In his video works, Christoph Girardet
explores cinematic illusion by extracting images from their original context. In order to
clarify the emotional potential and perceptual influence of film, he digitally edits
single sequences or narrative elements into rhythmic loops. In Enlighten (2000),
the artist edits together "special effects" scenes of lightning from movies and
television into a sequence that intensifies gradually and then dramatically to a climax,
suggesting human brain activity. Girardet (b. 1966, Germany) lives and works in New York.
Solo exhibitions of his work have been organized by the Kunsthalle Bielefeld (1999) and
Sean Kelly Gallery, New York (2000), among others. Selected group shows include
"Cinema, Cinema", Stedelijk Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven, The Netherlands (1999);
"Notorious", Museum of Modern Art, Oxford (2000); and his work has been featured
at various film and media festivals, recently at the 32nd Festival de Cannes, and won
several international awards.
"The video Enlighten collages found images of scenes of lightning taken
from a variety of existing films. The images are not "film from the real", but
were artificially produced for those films. They are clichés that suggest drama, fate, or
divine forces. Separated from their narrative context, they become signs, filled with
emotion. The arrangement of the material as very short sequences corresponds to a physical
perception of the lightning phenomena. Due to the alternating light/darkness, associated
with "electricity", the monitor where the work is presented recalls a machine
that permanently seems to be switching "on" and "off". Rhythmic
montage, the increasing speed between constantly shorter sequences and breaks, as well as
the synchronically cut sound montage, heightens the original intensity of the images,
which is transformed into a suggestive interplay between light and dark, presence and
absence, recognition and illusion."
--Christoph Girardet, 2000 |