In Search of.. / Practising for a new dawn
Anna Lilleengen
3rd April – 28th April
Wed, Thurs, Frid, Sat. 11am – 5pm
It is early morning on a deserted North German beach. The 1937 film camera picks up the first rays of the day’s sun alighting on the sand and waves. Using a technique of in-camera multiple exposure, where several images are taken on a single section of film before it is wound on, Anna abstracts the scene into something dreamlike and transcendental.
Coming in a steady stream, wave after wave of images, soothing and absorbing, alight on the viewer’s eye, echoing the silent rush of dawn waves to shore. The images of wave-swell become gradually hypnotic and by a process of affect encourage the viewer to surrender to a sense of time- and place-lessness.
This could be a generic beach, anywhere: a prototype beach. Visions of first mornings in idealized sci-fi worlds or the golden glow of a ‘paradise lost’ but now restored compete with a purely visual geometric interplay of light and dark on the brooding sand with its frothy, cyan waves.
There is a radical sense that in this moment, all that has passed is absolved and a future of promise remains – once the final wave pulls out.
Related reading:
- Plato’s Phaedrus
- Paradise Lost – John Milton
- The Spell of the Sensuous – David Abram
April, 2019
