ART REVIEW: Living Colours

Review of an exhibition of film installations
at the Pier Art Centre, Stromness, Orkney
3rd May to 7th June 2014

HALFWAY along the cobbled, winding main street of Stromness, Orkney’s second town, stands the Pier Arts Centre. Established in 1979 by the artist, author and peace activist Margaret Gardiner (1904 – 2005) it was extensively redesigned and extended in 2007 by the award-winning architects Reiach & Hall. Immersing oneself in its Scandinavian-style minimalistic ambience is as much part of the thrill of coming here as to view the exhibits. The black slate-tiled floor of the foyer and shop area quickly opens up to light airy spaces, white walls and parquet flooring, easily adapted to suit different types of exhibition.

Described in the pamphlet as “a display of joyous and playful sprit through careful manipulation of light, colour and sound” Living Colours is a sequence of short film installations made between 1926 and the present day, viewed by wandering through adjoining rooms. The artists’ concern is showing how abstract forms of colour can be created and presented as moving images; a kind of visual stream-of-consciousness.

Impressive as they are in their ingenuity the films are quite hard on the eyes. The common factors are moving, jumping, shifting abstract blocks of patterns and colours, making it difficult to think constructively about particular ideas or interpretations the artists wish to convey.

Arguably the installation with the most impact in terms of invoking sensorial discomfort whilst also being striking in its creativity is Dresden Dynamo, the earliest work by Lis Rhodes. Dating from 1972 it is a kaleidoscopic show of blue, red and green circles, squares, stripes and backgrounds which transform, merge, collide, reverse like a complicated artistic game of tag. The foreboding black screen with the film’s title in bold white lettering curtails, just for a moment, the onslaught of colours and rapid interplay of patterns. In employing this audacious contrast Rhodes maximises the viewer’s reaction to her piece, foreshadowing the themes of dissonance and disturbance found in her later work. It is not only one’s vision which is brutally assailed. The ears too are subjected to a cacophony of sounds – monotonic bleeps and techno-effects, seemingly incidental at first, but quickly establishing themselves as a distinct and deliberate element in Rhodes’ film.

Len Lye (1901–1980) was a New Zealand-born experimental filmmaker who lived and worked in Britain and the USA before returning to his native country. A Colour Box, dating from 1935, is the first of a series of promotional films he made for the GPO. Lye skilfully veils its advertorial purpose behind a fascinating sequence of colours and stripes of varying width, slowly shifting and transforming into the next abstract ‘idea’. He attempted, for the first time, to paint directly onto celluloid instead of applying it to canvas before filming his work. The only real clue who the film was made for lies in its title, superimposed across four red batik-print-like squares on a white background.

Continuing the theme of painting directly onto film while, at the same time introducing the ‘joyous’ element into the exhibition, are the early works by the Scottish-born Canadian animator Norman McLaren (1914 –1987). In Fiddle De Dee (1947) and Begone Dull Care (1949) McLaren thrillingly synchronises his vibrant kaleidoscopic displays of colour patterns and animated toy figures with background tracks by jazz pianist Oscar Peterson.

The landscape and nature of her native Orkney inspired Margaret Tait‘s (1918–1999) Colour Poems (1974) and Garden Pieces (1998) in which animated blocks of colour, patterns and collages of old film footage feature, conveying by implication rather than expression, a bygone age as though the colours are a form of poetry.

Katy Dove (b.1970) is interested in the sensorial experience, albeit in a less dramatic way to Rhodes. Engaging in multiple artistic disciplines she scans her watercolours, digitises and animates them, setting them to her own compositions. Her installation, entitled Welcome, dates from 2008. Like Margaret Tait, Dove is inspired by nature, but also by psychology which she studied previously and which now informs her work.

The notion of colours living or being alive, the inspiration for this exhibition’s title, is clearly palpable in the installations. They convey a truth and depth not always immediately recognisable within their rapidly altering patterns -- an uncanny reflection on real life.

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submitted to: Frieze Writer’s Prize, 2014
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