British-born, Berlin-based artist Tacita Dean presents her new film project JG at the from 7 February until 21 April. Commissioned by and made for the gallery, with funding from The Pew Center for Arts & Heritage, JG is the sequel to FILM, Dean’s 2011 project for Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall. The film is inspired by the filmmaker’s correspondence with British author J.G. Ballard regarding connections between Robert Smithson始s iconic earthwork and film Spiral Jetty and Ballard始s short story The Voices of Time.
JG is a 26-minute work is a looped 35mm anamorphic film shot on location in the saline landscapes of Utah and Southern California using Dean’s recently developed and patented system of aperture gate masking. This film stands as a radical departure from her previous 16mm films, as she tries to respond to Ballard始s challenge, posed to her shortly before he died, that Dean should 鈥渢reat the Spiral Jetty as a mystery her film would solve.鈥 Dean’s aperture gate masking invention (that she developed for FILM) is a labour-intensive technique that allows for various shapes to be exposed within a single frame, giving it the capacity to traverse time and location due the necessity of putting the film through the camera multiple times. The resulting images, primarily of a variety of salt-encrusted landscapes, invite the viewers to experience time and place in ways that parallel the the effects of Ballard始s fiction and Smithson始s earthwork and film.
Tacita Dean: JG, 7 February until 21 April, , 450 S. Easton Road Glenside, PA 19038 215-572-2131
All images courtesy of Tacita Dean.
