Screening and Discussion with Alexander Storey Gordon: High Entropy

Join artist Alexander Storey Gordon for a screening of recent work, an informal discussion, and a presentation about his practice and experience as an artist since graduating from Gray’s School of Art in 2010.

Alexander Storey Gordon makes drawings, films, texts and events that look at the way film and literature mediate perceptions and conceptions of ourselves, our environment and others.

Programme

These Are The Days My Friends, And These Are The Days My Friends, 2017. Video, 8 min 55 sec

An exploration of astrology as the innate human search for meaning and understanding through the movements of celestial bodies, and how this is still being used as a vehicle to process present day fears and provoke conspiracy theories. This work was filmed over several years during various cosmological events; partial eclipses, summer and winter equinoxes and harvest moons. The soundtrack is altered each time this work is screened where more recent recordings are added that largely draw from the growing online conspiracy theory surrounding dreams of ​‘two suns’.

ANALEPSIS/​PROLEPSIS, 2016. Video, 9 min 10 sec.

Made while Storey Gordon was on residency in Sao Paulo, this work records a journey from the coastline near where the first Portuguese settler João Ramalho lived to the centre of historic downtown Sao Paulo. The film attempts to access a certain Brazilian melancholia, as adverse to the national stereotype of melodrama, or happy, carnival people. Making reference to both Cinema Novo and Cinema Marginal movements as well as Brazilian 90s soft pop, old cars and architecture, the work employs an illogical and erratic use of flash forward and backwards (or analepsis and prolepsis) to both familiarise the viewer with what they are about to see or have seen and destabilise the sense of continuity of the journey from exterior to interior.

in-itself, 2015 – 17. Video, 11 min 35 sec

Taking Alain Resnais’ 1961 feature film Last year at Marienbad as a framework for a new piece of work, in-itself expands Resnais’ archetypal interplay between time, sound and image, across three screens, in an attempt to amplify its audio visual dissonance. Rather than focusing on the portrayal of characters, this work attempts to give form to a sense of personal loss, looking at absence and the things that surround a person.

Alexander Storey Gordon is an artist based in Glasgow. He graduated with a degree in Printmaking from Gray’s School of Art in 2010 and has since exhibited widely both within the UK and abroad. Alexander is also the producer of The Artist’s Moving Image Festival, Tramway/​LUX Scotland (from 2015 – present). Recent exhibitions include:

Interludes, Plymouth Art Centre and Mount Florida Screenings, Plymouth Art Weekender; On The Waves of The Air, There Is Dancing Out There, (a project with artist Carey Skinner), Glasgow International 2018; A Wondering Soul, Radiophrenia, CCA, Glasgow (collaboration with sound artist Richy Carey); Hospitalfield Summer Resident, 2017, Arbroath; A Apopheny, CCA Intermedia, Glasgow; Suppose there is, A, ICA Singapore; Aparição, Phosphorus, Sao Paulo; UR/​ERR, Film Open Touring Programme, exhibited at Eastside Projects, Spike Island, Castlefield Gallery, S1 Artspace, Tramway, and ICA, London; I Used Blood For The Red, PALA Projects curated by Laura Mansfield, Be Vigilant Dear Friends, Because You Never Know When Your Going To Have Your Eyes Gouged Out, Glasgow Project Rooms, 2014; Two Dichotoma Hum, Hydrapangaea, Glasgow International Festival, 2014; A Sleeping Cinema, Embassy Gallery, Edinburgh, 2013.