Cinema Parenthèse and iMAL invites the British artist SIMON PAYNE to talk about and show his works. Payne has been making abstract cinema for over twenty years. His videos are predominantly orientated around bold graphic forms and highly structured sequences that produce unexpected color combinations and conflicting planes. Sometimes there are contingent elements in his work, which correspond with incidental indications of the artist’s hand. The systems that underpin his videos involve the entirety of the screen and every edge. Their effects spill out of the screen, to illuminate the cinema in remarkable ways.
Payne co-edited the book Kurt Kren: Structural Films (2016) with Nicky Hamlyn and A.L. Rees, and recently edited a posthumous book by Rees, entitled Fields of View. He is an Associate Professor of Film and Media at Anglia Ruskin University, Cambridge and lives and works in London. He has also written widely on experimental cinema.
Payne’s work has shown in numerous festivals and venues including: Anthology Film Archives, New York; the Ann Arbor, Edinburgh, London and Rotterdam film festivals; Media City Festival, Windsor, Ontario; European Media Arts Festival, Osnabrück; the Serpentine and Whitechapel Galleries in London; Tate Britain and Tate Modern and the State Hermitage Museum in St Petersburg.
Program
Introduction by Simon Payne
- EDGES: WAVES (2018, video, b&w, sound, 6’00)WAVES is one of a series of videos in which everything happens at the edges of the frame. The action is minimal: waves are built up and then unfurl again. With his austere reductions of the medium, Payne achieves a conceptual rigour and yet retains a playful element.
- MAY (1998, video, color, sound, 1’45)Circumnavigation of an orchard on the edge of Maidstone.
- MONITOR (2002, video, color, silent, 4'00)An assertive polemic around first, second and third generations of the same image and the allied implications of that for texture, focus and resolution. MONITOR explores a range of interactions between representation, raster grid, the front glass of the TV and its reflections. These relationships are permutated through focus pulls which shift the interaction between image and raster screen in unexpected and often dramatic ways.- Nicky Hamlyn
- NEW RATIO (2007, video, color, sound, 1'40)A piece that explicitly explores the move from the 4:3 screen ratio to 16:9, which is now effectively the standard for broadcast television and video. The ratio and scale of the screen rapidly expands and contracts in a series of chromatic oscillations and phasing beeps. A hypnotic and sensory exploration of tonality and the screen’s limits and potential.
- IRIS OUT (2008, video, color, sound, 10'00)IRIS OUT is composed of single frames from sequences of expanding or contracting circles, reformatted for different aspect ratios. In certain passages of the video, the combination of circles and ellipses resembles an eye, returning the gaze of the spectator.
- CUT OUT (2013, video, color, sound, 3'33)A largely hand-made piece in comparison to most of my videos. CUT OUT involves different colored cards, with apertures cut out of them, superimposed in combinations starting from opposite ends of a simple spectrum (from yellow to blue). The method of superimposition is more complicated than it might at first seem, adding to the instability of the various planes, edges and colors.
- YES NO (2021, video, b&w, silent, 1'00)An affirmation and negation of cinema by way of an admixture of the words ‘YES’ and ‘NO’ in black-on-white or white-on-black which were traced from the screen.
- NOT AND OR (2014, video, b&w/color, silent, 18'00)NOT AND OR involves black and white quadrilaterals spinning in virtual space that alternate with the same static shapes re-filmed from a screen in real space. The second half of the piece is the same as the first, but flipped, reversed and re-filmed again, through successive generations - adding while taking away.
- EDGES: LADDERS (2018, video, b&w, sound, 4'00)LADDERS is one of a series of digital video pieces in which the edges of the frame are the focus. Here the edges of the screen are paired ladders that separate and come together in phases, matched by sine waves that slowly change pitch in phases.
Afterwords And Q&A with Simon Payne
Cinema Parenthèse is a collective of writers, programmers and filmmakers that organizes experi-mental film screenings and dialogues in Brussels. Current members are Wendy Evan, Els van Riel, Nicky Hamlyn, Daniel A. Swarthnas and Arindam Sen.