DARK – with Susan Francis, Josh Langan, Lemeh42, Semiconductor, John Smith

DARK exhibition places five time-based installations in the unusual space of CoExist Galleries (definitely not being a ‘white cube’ of a gallery). Each represents a different way of working with film and video, from narrated short story, a high tech digital piece to a site-specific time-lapse animation.

John Smith’s The Black Tower, from 1984, a classic piece of British independent filmmaking, and some say appropriately paranoid for its time, tells about a mysterious black building that unbearably haunts the narrator wherever he goes.

In the adjacent room, Italian artist Lemeh42 moves in, for a weekend prior to the opening, to create a large-scale wall drawing, filming the action in regular intervals. The resulting time-lapse animation will be shown alongside two of their previous surreal works, including Inner Klange, dedicated to Kandinskij’s call for finding an ‘inner voice’.

Semiconductor’s Black Rain shown in an unusual tall-screen vertical projection fills the Winch Room with a footage edited from raw scientific satellite data acquired from NASA STEREO mission. What you see is the HI (Heliospheric Imager) visual data as it tracks interplanetary space for solar wind and CME’s (coronal mass ejections) heading towards Earth.

Josh Langan’s video sculpture is made from four TVs stacked up like a block of flats, each showing a CCTV-like footage of people in their homes. The discarded and unfashionable bulky televisions signify our love with fast evolving technology, a progress that seems to turn against us (the UK is the most surveilled country in the world).

Susan Francis’ Night Vision, a study of dark thoughts and memories triggered in some people by the night-time, is presented in the Small Gallery, a cupboard-sized black painted room emphasising the intimacy of the video’s confessions.

This exhibition has been kindly supported by LUX and Metal.