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FLAT PACK
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Gallery: One
Artists involved:
SHEENA MACRAE
Sheena Macrae is a Canadian artist and filmmaker based in London. She has worked extensively in the film industry for studios such as MGM, 20th Century Fox, Disney and Warner Bros. Her art practice uses film, video and sculpture installation. Macrae graduated with a Masters in Fine Art from the premier art college, Goldsmiths at the University of London. She has exhibited internationally in the UK, Europe, North America, Australia and New Zealand. Her video art works have been shown in the Moscow International Film Festival, Avanto Media Art Festival in Helsinki, Xilourgio Mulos Cultural Center Greece, Imaginaria Internazionale di Cinema Libero, Italy winning Best Video Art Prize. She is currently preparing for a monograph museum show in Paris at the MAC/VAL Musée d'Art Contemporain Val-de-Marne.
Macrae’s work manipulates popular icons in film and video through compression, exploring the modern fascination with speed, nostalgia and entertainment. She appropriates cinema and television through digital technology fixing on pivotal repeating narratives. These works parody and reconstruct the dynamics of Hollywood clichés, our collective memory of them and standardised film narratives, co-opting the language of film and television to develop a remix.
From Flatpack TV ©Patricia Ellis, 2005
The golden god of television is the most alluring of all. The binding experience of collective culture is hinged on the aromatic cheese of fiction: lives benchmarked by vicarious plot lines, entire nations gripped by monumentous non-moments, caught up in the escapism of the unreal. The name of the guy who tried to assassinate the pope may be long forgotten, but everyone remembers who shot JR. It’s primacy in memory is a product of its formulaic design.
The quality of the epic always resides in a single breathless moment. As if the universe were anchored by sync points, where for just one video frame, one thirtieth of a second, all of its truths are revealed in fragmented, incomprehensively overwhelming glory. It’s an indefinable sentiment, expansive beyond language, residing in the intangible realms of the metaphysical. A place not unlike your tv screen. Perhaps Sheena Macrae is a diviner; her ability to extricate the essence from the epic is uncanny.
Sheena Macrae’s work might best be described as ‘compressions’: her massive feats of editing remix films into miniature, yet unabridged sagas: their effect is something like speed-reading. The construction of the epic follows a well-worn blueprint: melodrama strung out in a chronicle of associative crescendo, building up to that one climactic moment. Deconstructing the fabric of fantasy to its easily flat-packed transportability, Dallas consolidates the entire 1980 mini-series into one 50 minute episode. Fading each programme to a translucent layer, and all 18 simultaneously as multiple images. Here, Macrae’s powers of post-production control slide seamlessly into the world of psychoanalysis and innuendo. Time and space collapse as ‘realities’ converge with maddening indistinction: JR’s attempted murder, Sue Ellen’s alcoholism, Lucy & Mitch’s wedding, Pam’s adulterous affair, Bobby’s power lust. The aesthetic of technical dysfunction mirrors emotional breakdown, spiralling with the hazy imprecision of viewers’ memory. It’s all too much to bear, but oh-so entrancingly beautiful.
Like a drug or a diamond, a screen-size cosmos for the taking. Ergonomic, perfect, and larger than life.
For More Information: www.sheenamacrae.com
Artists involved:
SHEENA MACRAE
Sheena Macrae is a Canadian artist and filmmaker based in London. She has worked extensively in the film industry for studios such as MGM, 20th Century Fox, Disney and Warner Bros. Her art practice uses film, video and sculpture installation. Macrae graduated with a Masters in Fine Art from the premier art college, Goldsmiths at the University of London. She has exhibited internationally in the UK, Europe, North America, Australia and New Zealand. Her video art works have been shown in the Moscow International Film Festival, Avanto Media Art Festival in Helsinki, Xilourgio Mulos Cultural Center Greece, Imaginaria Internazionale di Cinema Libero, Italy winning Best Video Art Prize. She is currently preparing for a monograph museum show in Paris at the MAC/VAL Musée d'Art Contemporain Val-de-Marne.
Macrae’s work manipulates popular icons in film and video through compression, exploring the modern fascination with speed, nostalgia and entertainment. She appropriates cinema and television through digital technology fixing on pivotal repeating narratives. These works parody and reconstruct the dynamics of Hollywood clichés, our collective memory of them and standardised film narratives, co-opting the language of film and television to develop a remix.
From Flatpack TV ©Patricia Ellis, 2005
The golden god of television is the most alluring of all. The binding experience of collective culture is hinged on the aromatic cheese of fiction: lives benchmarked by vicarious plot lines, entire nations gripped by monumentous non-moments, caught up in the escapism of the unreal. The name of the guy who tried to assassinate the pope may be long forgotten, but everyone remembers who shot JR. It’s primacy in memory is a product of its formulaic design.
The quality of the epic always resides in a single breathless moment. As if the universe were anchored by sync points, where for just one video frame, one thirtieth of a second, all of its truths are revealed in fragmented, incomprehensively overwhelming glory. It’s an indefinable sentiment, expansive beyond language, residing in the intangible realms of the metaphysical. A place not unlike your tv screen. Perhaps Sheena Macrae is a diviner; her ability to extricate the essence from the epic is uncanny.
Sheena Macrae’s work might best be described as ‘compressions’: her massive feats of editing remix films into miniature, yet unabridged sagas: their effect is something like speed-reading. The construction of the epic follows a well-worn blueprint: melodrama strung out in a chronicle of associative crescendo, building up to that one climactic moment. Deconstructing the fabric of fantasy to its easily flat-packed transportability, Dallas consolidates the entire 1980 mini-series into one 50 minute episode. Fading each programme to a translucent layer, and all 18 simultaneously as multiple images. Here, Macrae’s powers of post-production control slide seamlessly into the world of psychoanalysis and innuendo. Time and space collapse as ‘realities’ converge with maddening indistinction: JR’s attempted murder, Sue Ellen’s alcoholism, Lucy & Mitch’s wedding, Pam’s adulterous affair, Bobby’s power lust. The aesthetic of technical dysfunction mirrors emotional breakdown, spiralling with the hazy imprecision of viewers’ memory. It’s all too much to bear, but oh-so entrancingly beautiful.
Like a drug or a diamond, a screen-size cosmos for the taking. Ergonomic, perfect, and larger than life.
For More Information: www.sheenamacrae.com