Ceal Floyer
Three wishes
2003
Printed text on foam board
27.2 x 21.2 cmEdition of 3

The Green On Red Gallery hosts its third curated group exhibition entitled Video Time. Curated by Jerome O Drisceoil, this exhibition opens the new year with five invited artists from the U. S. A. and Europe: Darren Almond, Ceal Floyer, Igor and Svetlana Kopystiansky, and Richard Serra. Inspired by a number of pioneering video works by Serra, this exhibition brings together a collection of video/ filmworks whose use of the medium concentrates and extends the viewers' experience of the passing of time. In each work, in different ways, the spectator is asked to re-situate themselves in a phenomenological dialogue about time and place. The four works selected are entitled Time and Time Again, H2O Diptych, 16x (" times 16 ") and Railroad Tunbridge, respectively.

Richard Serra's Railroad Turnbridge (1976, 16mm black & white film transferred to video; duration: 17 mins) does with film what his infamous cor-ten steel sculptures do to the third dimension The parallax that the viewer experiences as he or she moves through a Serra sculpture is echoed in this video work. The sense of disorientation generated by the turning bridge and the fixed camera - or is it the other way round - holds the viewer in an uneasy suspense.

Hand Catching Lead (1968, 16mm black & white film transferred to video; duration 3 mins 30 sec) is a seminal and early film in which the artist films a grimy outstretched male hand repetitively catching a bar of lead. This film is part of a series of four in which Serra documented his interaction with the materials of his sculptures - in the act of scraping, being physically restrained, holding a roll of lead. One is drawn into an anticipatory state of expectation, experiencing the weight of lead falling into one's hand and anticipating catching it or possibly dropping it.

In 16x (1979) by Igor and Svetlana Kopystiansky the camera's gaze is fixed directly upward. This is the reverse of the classic Rodchenko aerial photographs of the 1920's. Here the Kopystianskys' camera follows the route of the overhead Moscow tramlines on their way to some unknown destination. The result of this film, based on a mundane event, is a delicately moving drawing. It is difficult not to be reminded of early 20th century Suprematism. This work is accompanied by four photographs which the Kopystiankys took in the Moscow underground. These blurred photographs have a very contemporary casualness about them that less suggests utopia than a sense of numb activity.

Ceal Floyer has described the H2O Diptych as an attempt to create an experience of suspended self-awareness, of being on the fulcrum between anticipation and hindsight, in a dead zone. This diptych shows on the one monitor a glass of sparkling water losing its effervescence; on the other monitor a pan of water slowly comes to the boil. The action in the video is slow and boring. Hers is a witty and poetic insinuation of a condition of being cancelled out. The point of it will probably lodge itself in your brain and click into recognition on the bus on the way home.

Darren Almond's piece, Time and Time Again is the only projection work in this exhibition. It perfectly exemplifies Almond's preoccupation with an intensified experience of time. This work, which features a clock loudly 'announcing' the passing of seconds into minutes and hours, presents time as a mechanical structure, as a temporal condition, as a cosmic event and presents the viewer with a theoretical predicament or state of self-reflexive debate -what is one's relationship to time and place and to the world at large?