We use the cookies _ga, _gat, _gid to collect anonymous data about how you use this site. OK.
Independence
was created for the re-opening of the Curzon Soho, after the famous London cinema was flooded in 2002.
The work was authored as a Flash animation and then coded for DVD for projection in each of the Curzon's 3 screens immediately before the main feature.
Independence
combines text and graphics based primarily on the distinctive blue neon that outlines the elevation of the cinema canopy. Fittingly for an independent arthouse cinema, the text investigates the possibility of living independently, seeing beyond the mundane to the miraculous.
The text illustrated is prefaced by the line,
Underneath the myth of the ordinary world...
The observation 'everything streams, everything blazes' echoes the tone of the childhood sequences in
The Waves
by Virginia Woolf, which the artist had read and admired around this time.
NOTE
Adeline Virginia Woolf, née Stephen, (1882 – 1941) was an English novelist, critic and feminist writer. She is considered one of the most important modernist authors of the 20th Century. She pioneered a 'stream of consciousness' approach to narrative in which the naturalistic, fleeting impressions experienced by her characters, take the place of traditional plot.
The Waves
(Hogarth Press, 1931) is regarded as Woolf's most experimental novel, consisting entirely of soliloquies spoken by the novel's six protagonists: Bernard, Susan, Rhoda, Neville, Jinny and Louis. A seventh character, Percival, is spoken about, but never speaks.
Independence
culminates in a celebration of flaws, originality, and the unique nature of each human being.
The complete text reads:
To be fixated with the surface of things denies everything else of interest - compassion, intelligence, wit, wisdom, clarity, bravery, courage, impulsiveness, vitality, conviction, spiritedness.
Who in their right mind would reduce all of this to the surface only?
As you look beyond the surface, you enter a new world with a new language, you isolate yourself from the non-speakers, non-seers.
All around us the ordinary work is a shadow, a thin film. I have pushed through I have seen through to the other side.
Underneath the myth of the ordinary world, everything streams, everything blazes...
Have you ever noticed the most interesting, the most dangerous, the most flagrant people are always in the smoking section?
The exotic, the strange, affecting, clever, glorious, exotic, strange affecting variety of us as brothers, visionaries, rogues, lovers, brothers, writers, mistresses, healers, addicts, conspirators, drunks.
Look around. The glory of us because we are capable of independent thought. The glory of us as differentiated, once only, fingerprint-print originals.
Look around you: ideas, loves, lusts, quirks, ill-founded beliefs, all too personal truths.
Independence.
