LUX Scotland presents: heaven can wait

Artists and collaborators, Graeme Roger and Kevin Reid (Roger & Reid), have selected a series of music videos and artists’ films that have shaped their ideas or share their interest in theatrical video work. These include films that are playful and concerned with cultural oddballs, outsiders and psychotropic adventures in the Scottish landscape.

Programme

The Beta Band, Inner Meet Me, 1998, SD video, 6 min

Bedwyr Williams, Flexure, 2016, HD video, 25 min

Jesse Rae, The Thistle, 1985, SD video, 5 min

Michelle Naismith, Can I Caress The Hope, 2004. SD video, 10 min

Roger & Reid, The Dogby RM Hubbert and Kathryn Joseph, 2016. HD video, 4 min

Johnny Barrington, Tumult, 2012, HD video, 13min

Programme duration: 63 min + introduction from Graeme Roger.

Roger & Reid have worked on collaborative projects since 2003 after graduating from Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art & Design. Graeme Roger is currently a Producer of Film & Visual Art Projects at Eden Court Theatre. Kevin Reid is a Creative Producer at The Stove Network in Dumfries.

The Dog (2016) was co-written RM Hubbert and Kathryn Joseph. RM Hubbert is a guitarist and singer from Scotland.He writes music about love, death, friendship, mental illness and occasionally a dog called D Bone. The Dog features on his album Telling The Trees which was shortlisted for the 2016 Scottish Album of the Year Award. Kathryn Joseph is a Scottish singer-songwriter and musician. Her debut album Bones You Have Thrown Me and Blood I’ve Spilled won the 2015 Scottish Album of the Year Award. The video was created by Graeme Roger and Kevin Reid (Roger & Reid) their second for the label Chemikal Undergound having already worked with The Phantom band on Clapshot.

The Beta Band were a Scottish musical group formed in 1996. They were critically acclaimed and have achieved a cult status. Their style was described as being ​“folktronica”, a blend of folk, Scottish, electronic, rock, trip hop, and experimental jamming. The video for Inner Meet Me (1998), directed by John Maclean and shot on Stac Pollaidh, sees a group of aliens land and climb a mountain to build some sort of beacon.

Bedwyr Williams often draws upon the quirky banalities of his own autobiographic existence to develop his sculptures, performances and videos. His work merges art and life with a comedic twist that is instantaneously sympathetic and relational. In Flexure(2016) a technologically challenged hypnotist becomes hooked on his own self-hypnosis tapes but his work is interrupted by a nuisance neighbour, who shouts crazy things at him like ​‘cream cracker’ which he hears as it travels down their shared chimney. Entering another time and space, he weaves through the landmarks of the Cheshire town of Macclesfield, then meets a local yoga teacher. The hypnotist then takes on the form of another character, becoming ​“extra supple – almost like an instant yogi.”

Jesse Rae is a Scottish singer and composer from St Boswells in Scotland. Rae’s single ​“Over the Sea”, reached number 65 in the UK Singles Chart in 1985. His forst studio album, The Thistle,was released in 1987. As a songwriter, Rae is best known for the 1982 song, Inside Out, a hit single by the band Odyssey.

The title of Michelle Naismith’s video Can I caress the Hoperefers directly to an absurd piece of French politesse, ​“puis je caresser l’espoir..’”- for example, you could say ​“can I caress the hope of having a glass of water?” Set in and around a housing project in the outskirts of Nantes, France (built in 1968), more often than not housing people of a non-French origin, the video documents the site in a fractured style, using text along with harpsichord music from the time of Louis IV, the ​‘City of Malakoff’, before its imminent demise. The buildings have since been demolished.

“Michelle Naismith’s videos are elaborate fictions based loosely on fact, or a version of it. Deliberately theatrical, often reliant on props and disguise, the films create plausible worlds in which certainties are undermined.” – Fiona Bradley, Fruitmarket Gallery Edinburgh

In Tumult (2012), directed and written by Johnny Barrington, a tribe of Norse warriors traipse across a barren land after battle. Bloodied and wounded, their chief is near death. He is about to hand over power to his son when an army of a completely different kind descends upon them. Barrington grew up on the Isle of Skye and studied Fine Art Photography at The Glasgow School of Art and Göteborg School of Photography & Film. He has written and directed four short films and is writing his first feature film, COCCYX. He lives and works in Glasgow.