Peckham Artist Moving Image Festival

19^th September 2012

www.pami.org.uk

It’s getting cold in London these last few days. Autumn is almost here and, despite the chill, I am enjoying the clear blue skies. As I take the bus from New Cross to Peckham for PAMI (Peckham Artist Moving Image Festival) the setting sun bursts out from behind long, dark blue clouds, at an angle that practically blinds me for a few moments as I step out on to the street. It’s always great to come to Peckham for shows, I love the ‘show’ of the main street, Rye Lane, which is filled with every imaginable business. There is so much visual information to look at, posters for cell phone deals, fruit and vegetable sellers, pound shops, spicy food restaurants, and salons with garish brightly coloured walls, full of ladies getting their hair and nails done. The energy of this market follows me as turn past Peckham Rye station and head down a quiet street to the first gallery.

Left: MOCA Project Space

At MOCA project space, there was a three-videos show called Myopia Sparkles curated by Harriet B Mitchell and including work by Jennifer West, Edith Dekyndt and Shana Moulton. The films included a 16mm (but transferred to dvd) abstract film, a video showing a hand cupping a whirling mercury-like substance, and a third narrative film involving a lot of strangely implanted people and obvious green screen work, with soundtrack. The placement of the work in the exhibition space felt balanced, with a variety of approaches to the moving image from abstract to narrative; from physical to digital maneuvers. The use of colour was striking in all three videos, the soundtrack of Moulton’s felt strangely like something I would listen to while getting acupuncture. The bizarre mixture gave a sense of feeling a bit in an altered state, but a calm and perceptive altered state. I was pleasantly surprised to see 16mm, and as I look at West’s notes I see that the film leader was “lined with liquid black eyeliner, doused with Jello Vodka shots and rubbed with body glitter”, a very physical intervention to create a moving image, a characteristic which made it stand out from anything else I would see that night.

Left: MOCA Project Space

Another notable video was the extremely short (40 seconds!) work by Adrianna Palazzolo at Flat Time House. Spliced between two videos involving cats (not sure if this was coincidence), Palazzolo’s work featured images of a rose and found footage from a documentary about consciousness in plants. Both had been substantially altered through processing, with many jagged cuts to the picture, like the fragmented jerky image that happens when you pause your vhs. The degradation of the video contrasted with the image of a perfect beautiful rose and seemed to imply a kind of disturbance in quite an unsettling and sinister way. The darkness and subdued quality of the work really stayed with me, and it’s one I would like to have seen again, on a larger screen to really appreciate the manipulation of the image and the rhythm of the editing.

At Sunday Painter they showed Wallpapers, a collaboration between Vancouver artists Nicolas Sasson, Sara Ludy and Sylvain Sailly. The upstairs room had one wall entirely filled with a projection of a pixilated moving surface, sort of like a gif of a thousand bacteria swarming under a microscope. This was one of my favourite exhibitions. The space is large and this greatly benefits the installation. The ‘wallpapers’ can also be found on-line (http://www.thesundaypainter.co.uk/), but one of the charms of seeing it in the gallery is feeling like a miniature person dwarfed by a giant computer screen. Or perhaps the screen becomes a window into another digital world. We used to watch waves from the picture window, now we contemplate the endless undulations of what is essentially a large-scale version of a screensaver.

Right: Watching video at FoodFace

The exhibition at FoodFace was entitled Grander Designs, and is an on-going collaborative video project headed by Myles Painter, showing videos made by artists based on footage from the original television series Grand Designs, featuring six video played alternatingly between three monitors. I saw the submissions by Gareth Owen Lloyd and Joseph Popper as well as Myles Painter and found them humourous but perhaps limited given the fact that the artists had to work with ‘predetermined sections’ of tape. I was more intrigued by the strange excavations of dialogue appropriated in Painter’s work, where the source was less predominate and original dialogue had been altered to sound like the gravelly voices of ‘anonymous’ crime victims giving television interviews.

What did I see tonight? A lot of collage, a lot of mixing from original sources, sampling. Very modest work, nothing world changing, but definitely charming.  The thing about going to moving image festivals is that there is often so many works by so many people, which you only get to really see a few depending on when you arrive, that I’m left with a sense of seeing so many fragments. Many things I wouldn’t mind seeing twice, having a moment to digest them, seeing what repetition does to the meaning. Works that were shown in larger spaces, such as at Sunday Painter and MOCA project space really benefited from them. Most of the art here felt small and quirky, and the evening felt like little hiccups of somewhat digested visual culture. I sense the potential for some of these works to be ‘greater’ actual physical experiences on a large screen, but unfortunately I was left wanting. What does this say about our culture? It speaks to the incessant mixing of sources that we encounter daily, to our love of the mundane, and of cats. The evening left me feeling sentimental about pixels, 16mm film and Youtube videos, and reminded me of how much of our lives and sense of place are formed by the ephemeral experiences of moving images, most of them not ‘high culture’.  It is a medium that we all have such personal experiences on own ‘personal’ computers and private living rooms, that it was a pleasure to see these sources reconfigured and presented on a public scale, and to get some sense of the gentle humour, unexpected narratives and calming familiarity of digital culture.