Short Cuts

27 March - 1 May 2010

Spitfire Beach, Lisa Stansbie, 2010.

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Continuing a season of exhibitions investigating parallels between art and cinema, g39 presents a new group exhibition inspired by the film Short Cuts (1993). Directed by Robert Altman and drawn from nine short stories and a poem by Raymond Carver, the film traces the actions of twenty-two principal characters, both in parallel and at occasional loose points of connection.

Short Cuts does not conform to traditional narrative Hollywood cinema. There is narrative, to be sure, though the manner in which narrative operates moves far and away from classical Hollywood style. The movie employs a non-linear, dynamic and somewhat negotiable framework of stories.

This show brings together work from Tim Freeman, Henry Gwiazda, Rick Niebe and Lisa Stansbie, who all offer their own hypertext on a variety of narratives. Like the film, the works shown here offer parallel themes and fiction within each of the works, depending on and determined by the interpretation of the viewer.

Lisa Stansbie continues an exploration of sculpture, film and photography through the use of Airfix model kits, informed by ambiguous narratives and stories. Through the use of out-dated analogue film stock and digital manipulation, Wales-based Tim Freeman’s Anti Nature uses un-doctored photographic images alongside manipulated ones, raising questions of the factual and fictitious elements of photography. Rick Niebe focuses his attention on ordinary anonymous images as well as on fragments from cinematographic history whilst Henry Gwiazda uses CGI moving image informed by his sound composition practice, aiming to disorient the viewer whilst playing a game between memory and formation of new meanings.

Each work defies the concept of linear time and experience in the same way that the film Short Cuts presents you with an almost chaotic narrative of connections.