Mineral Park, more information, opens 9 August

by Alex Hetherington, 11 Jul 2008

Mineral Park assembles multiple materials, narratives, video, sound, biography, music, performances and texts that play in and out of sequence and synchronization to generate multiple and differing, evolving experiences from the specifically chosen and researched materials. Alongside this Hetherington has selected a number of international video artists whose work corresponds in different ways to the materials and themes in the show: here he attempts to synchronize his practice to the work of other artists generating further alliances, sequences, disruptions, coincidences, abrasions. The show will be self-generating; the work will change and evolve independently during its installation.

The materials used are: the biography of the twins Jennifer and June Gibbons, the notorious sisters who created a secret language and had a pact not to communicate with the outside world; performance footage re-enacting songs by the Cocteau Twins, a band from Grangemouth who achieved international success with their beautiful and ethereal songs, featuring the singer Elizabeth Fraser who created a difficult to understand language; video footage shot at the Grand Canyon and Mineral Park, a ghost town in Arizona, footage from Falkirk Cultural Center in San Rafael, California, the one time home of industrialist Robert Dollar; two high energy disco, acid house songs: Voodoo Ray (A Guy Called Gerald) and Let Me think About It (Ida Corr & Fedde Le Grand) and the description of a mid-air plane collision and the language psychology of why gay men speak with a sibilant S.

Hetherington investigates the context of the ‘exhibition’, ‘screening’ and ‘group show’ by juxtaposing different disparate materials over multiple screens over the duration of a regular feature film, 90 minutes. In addition the material includes works by a group of artists working with similar, contrasting or disruptive themes central to Hetherington’s practice: the interrogation of the nature of pre-existing images, texts, films, performances and the context of the exhibition as well the tensions revealed in their reworking, their reorganisation, their presentation. Further themes include the nature of language, the construction of gender in cinema and theatre, and the synchronization of assembled materials: live and pre-recorded, improvised and immediate, past and present, incongruous and abrasive and the collage and re-enactment as embodiments of the ambiguities surrounding identity and the self-portrait.

Anne Colvin’s video loops deliver a mesmerizing take on reworked imagery. Re-animated clips coalesce with occasional sound along a carefully edited timeline creating an experience more akin to musical abstraction than a linear filmed narrative; her work “The Audition” throws a scene from Godard’s “Contempt” – one of those quintessential Nouvelle Vague films about film – into a monochromatic (red and black) dreamscape of movement and audio crescendo. The players are stuck in their bit part audition tirelessly waiting for rejection or inclusion.

John Sebastian Vitale screens two video works On it (American Voodoo Wish Machine) and I is Something (Free Band T-shirts). Both are documentation of a performance/installation and an interactive sculpture. Vitale works here with performance strategies surrounding magic, distortion, mystery, sonic vocabularies and a rock and roll sensibility discharging an intense visual and aural interference through the screening space.

Troglodyte by Desirée Holman is similarly charged performative based work and extends its vocabularies to the absurd, the theatrical. In a comic and ridiculous gesture, Holman investigates human emotion and behavior by pretending to be a chimpanzee. The term ‘troglodyte’ describes a simpleton or brute who may live in a hole in the ground or in a cave. A troglodyte is emotionally reactive and potentially dangerous; s/he is without acute powers of reasoning. The video plays with ideas of violence, sex, animism, nurturance and the primal horde.

Lewis Holleran’s double-screen installation The Cupboard Scene is presented here as a single-channel video. A recent graduate from the Environmental Art Department, Glasgow School of Art he works with themes central to Hollywood’s film noir, immersion and the
sensory perception of contrast, rhythm and timing. The Cupboard Scene employs selected sequences from Orson Welles’ 1962 motion picture The Trial. He sets the characters from the feature film into a perpetual dilemma, between light and dark, deliverance and impasse.

Lucy Keany, works with performance and video materials surrounding feminine identity, titillation, the gaze and archetypes from glamour. Her video and photographic pieces involve working with performers or people in performance roles: participants become a kind of surrogate material. This new work Is That a Cowboy Outfit features fast editing and a double-screen technique to impress upon a sense of her screen as equipment of empowerment, conflict and challenge. The performance to camera in the work features the artist, and Missy Malone, a Burlesque performer, model and actor.

Zefrey Throwell’s Nausea employs numerous video compositing techniques, tests, sounds, suggestions of possible narratives and confrontational depictions to generate a disquieting space of anticipation, distortion and predicament. It mirrors, recreates and summarizes the intensity of emotions and consequences within miscommunication, misinterpretation.

Mineral Park is accompanied by a limited edition publication; copies of Lucy Keany’s Fool’s Gold publication will also be available.