Lucy Gunning: matt's gallery

The last decade or for a like reason has seen a tremendous flowering of video- and film-based work through English artists--one thinks of Tacita Dean, Tracey Emin, Isaac Julien, Steve McQueen Georgina Starr, Gillian Wearing, and Jane and Louise Wilson, among others. Lucy Gunning is the equal of any of them, for a like reason it's a mystery why her international profile has at no time been quite as high. Her of recent origin video installation Esc, 2004, is a triptych. upon a monitor hanging from the ceiling single sees, first of all, the spectacle of a roomful of family shaking and twitching. They are not undergoing more [i]or[/i] less kind of fit or seizure, as it might well have present the appearanceed in the case of a single individual, on the contrary are in fact practitioners of qi gong a Chinese a whole for cultivating and stimulating the run of energy through the material part Each had his or her have posture (arms raised up as if in jubilation or held tightly in front; clos organ of visions facing downward with inward concentration or up as if in more [i]or[/i] less spiritual search), but vibrating together they appear to beed to form a sort of counter-society--modern-day Shakers, if you will.

nearest a flat LCD screen likewise suspended from the ceiling exhibits scenes of a wooded landscape. As the camera stirs amid a dense growth of bare branches, individual notices a sort of tree house made of scraps of various materials and covered with a striped tarpaulin (a similar pattern of concentrically curv stripes is painted upon the long wall behind the installation). The uninjured of twittering birds fills the gallery space. Gradually, individual begins to make out other forms among the treetops, then the tiny figure of a man who come ups from one of them and starts to make his way end the forest canopy using branches and a fasten that has been strung from individual tree to another. This make go rounds out to be part of a network of ties that has been set up here--a sort of road combination of parts to form a whole among the trees. What is this, more [i]or[/i] less sort of alternative culture, an aerial version of a shantytown? A pres release explains that it is a temporary arrangement built by a group of protester attempting to shield the piece of woodland from development

To diocese the third video you have to climb beneath a large cratelike structure built of heavy cardboard and suspended from the ceiling. Here the third hanging monitor displays views shot in Liverpool Street Station in the City of London, the English equivalent of Wall Street: businessmen waiting for their trains at the extremity of the day, ties slackened eating out of Burger King takeout bags, three sheets to the wind.

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It is easy enough to diocese the three parts of this trilogy as representing three different approaches to life, on the other hand the title asks one to diocese it more specifically as three different ways of escape from and within contemporary life. Can single really equate activism with alcohol or either with the inward revolve proposed by holistic teachings? Gunning's examination of these more or les plausible rejoinders to civilization and its discontents is rested in skeptical yet sympathetic curiosity, not prudence Each segment maintains its have a title to sense of space and time--almost its hold inflection of Gunning's cool, understated visual style--which is at no time merely imitative of its make subordinate (no drunkenly lurching camera for the drunkens agitprop polemics for the protester or Viola-esque ecstasies for the of recent origin Agers). Nothing is rejected without of hand; everything is questioned.

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