Rose Lowder: Optical events

“Optical Events” presents some of the artist’s earliest films, in which details of everyday surroundings are manipulated by the film camera to become abstract motifs, with the author focusing primarily on studies of vision and the functioning of the film camera.

Program curators: art historian and curator Inesa Brašiškė and MO Museum chief curator Miglė Survilaitė

WARNING: The films use flickering images that may cause health problems.

Parcelle

Composed frame by frame in the camera, PARCELLE (fragment, particle or bit) rests upon the alternate appearance and variable duration of tiny colored squares or circles placed on black backgrounds and inserted in series between plain white or colored images. Although the film, filmed frame by frame, may appear conventional on a technical level, this is not the case conceptually as it has been conceived to pin point situations requiring the sense of perception to process images in various time lengths according to the characteristics viewed, a procedure which provokes the experience of optical superimpositions on the screen.

Retour d’un Repère

The procedure of separating and extracting certain aspects of a scene by adjusting the focus of a series of frames in succession according to various organizational patterns is developed in Retour d’un repère in a particular way. While the filmic operations are structured in relation to a limited space (a branch over a 19c duck pond), the filmic process rests on a visual transformation of a pantoun, a verse form borrowed from literary rhetorics, which characteristically transforms itself gradually and continuously in a precise manner.

Rue des Teinturiers 

In Rue des Teinturiers the focus of each image, recorded frame by frame in the camera, is adjusted so that graphic features of items in the street that gives its name to the film are extracted and inscribed onto the film strip in a way which allows their characteristics to be seen, when projected in succession on the screen, as parts of a spatiotemporal situation stretching from a position on a balcony over a canalized river to the road. The film is composed of twelve reels, each filmed on a different day throughout a six-month period, joined together in a slightly nonchronological order so as to avoid accentuating anecdotical aspects of the scene.

Les Tournesols + Les Tournesols Colorés

Structured in the camera by adjusting the focus frame by frame according to a series of patterns on particular plants situated in different areas of several contiguous sunflower fields, Sunflowers tries to make the whole spatio-temporal representation gain a certain stability, while keeping the graphic elements of the image mobile. The small cluster of frames, filmed one after the other, overlap each other on the screen to form various configurations.