Events

For the past ten years artists Graham Ellard and Stephen Johnstone have concentrated on making short, hand-crafted 16mm films for single screen projection and gallery installation. Employing the camera as an investigative tool, their films emphasise the camera's ability to produce ambiguities of scale, depth or shallowness, counter-intuitive forms of transparency and reflection, and centre on the altered forms of attention, and the resulting intensity of looking, that comes from using a lens to frame and magnify architectural details and fleeting atmospheric effects.

In this talk they will screen two films, both of which were shot in key post-war Italian Museums. The first, Everything Made Bronze, investigates Carlo Scarpa's innovative use of natural light and reflection in the Gipsoteca Canoviana in Possagno, and the second Neue Museen, reconstructs Franco Albini's extraordinary hydraulic display device for floating Giovanni's Pisano's sculptural fragment from the tomb of Margherita di Brabante, first installed in The Palazzo Bianco in Genoa in 1951.

Graham Ellard and Stephen Johnstone have worked together since 1993. Most recently their 16mm films have been included in Glass! Love! Perpetual Motion!, Anthology Film Archives, New York (2014); A Merman I Should Turn To Be, Laura Bartlett Gallery, London (2014); Assembly: A survey of recent artists' film and video in Britain 2008-2013, Tate Britain (2014). Their film installation Everything Made Bronze is currently showing at Plymouth Arts Centre.