Wavelengths 2: Now & Then

Proposing simplicity as a radical antidote to today's fervent desire for intricacy, these films and videos draw upon either a collaborative process or an intimate subjective encounter to explore the correspondence between images and their perception. Exquisitely shot on 16mm in the French countryside near Avignon, Hannes Schüpbach's Instants explores the nature of spontaneous time as related to the thinking of French writer Joël-Claude Meffre, transcending portraiture as it not only records the poet working, but also develops a memory of its own. Pepper's Ghost, by Torontonian Stephen Broomer, transforms an office formerly used for observation studies into a tunnel of performative, transfixing illusionism, creating surprising images using filters, fabric and a combination of sunlight and fluorescents. Recalling Slidelength (1969-71), Michael Snow's slideshow of plastic gels and hand gestures, Pepper's Ghost is a prolonged expression of demystified mystification, whose startling results are bolstered by a bold soundtrack.

A contemporary version of Muybridgean motion studies meets Duchamp's Nude Descending a Staircase in Ruben Glauser, Max Idje and Christophe M. Saber's Homme en movement, 2012. Constructed from the delays in real-time video feedback and recorded onto black-and-white 16mm, the film forms a multiple space via the shifting angles of view in the mysterious passages of a video eye.

Naoko Tasaka's sphinx-like Flower unfolds like a children's story before it plumbs the depths of both a physical and metaphorical surface, as straightforward narration gives way to sublimated abstraction. Employing a number of multi-format techniques, Flower displays a compelling, duelling impulse that hovers between a grid and a waterfall. Constellations, a recent grouping of 16mm colour silent blow-ups by Super 8 artist Helga Fanderl, returns us to the natural world, whose beauty has been observed and rendered with a profound curiosity, a patient gaze and an extraordinary ability to capture visual patterns and textures. Whether following at close range the semi-circular motion of a handsome, pacing leopard, its spots evoking rhythmic patterns through Fanderl's intuitive shooting process, or closely studying a tray of glassware on a ship as the sea reflects and refracts through the crystalline shapes, the artist fully gives herself over to the present moment and allows us to bask in it.

ANDRÉA PICARD