John Gillett
Loss of Gravity
26 October - 1 December 2002
Loss of Gravity brought together a number of new works by John Gillett. The works which were on show developed John’s established design practice and interest in the role of digital media for presentation and distribution. Each work involves a pairing of a moving image and a hand-constructed pop-up book; in effect, the film of the book and the book of the film, each giving the viewer a different means of access to the same basic subject matter, but each offering a different emphasis.
In Loss of Gravity a flock of seagulls teems around the Southampton docks, the birds’ flightpaths describing random letters in the sky. The strange and transitory excitement of unprovably witnessing a word is somehow at odds with the gentle melancholy of waiting for the moment to arrive, wondering whether or not coincidence is a real or imaginary force in the world. In the accompanying books, some ten or twelve volumes, the words (or non-words) gradually emerge as the pages turn. But their appearance is not a random event, since they have been put there by the author. Yet the words themselves are arbitrary; the viewers project meanings upon them exactly as they might imagine seeing words or images in the natural world.
England’s Glory uses similar computer code to similar ends. The birds circle a Union Jack, flapping in the seaside breeze. Their randomly determined configurations are from given lists of words, so the piece is far less random. The birds, as it were, have a vocabulary and the vocabulary is that of national heritage and patriotism. The work gives a smart salute to the arbitrariness of our allegiances. In True Grit, the units of random manipulation will be grains of sand beneath the incoming tide. As the waves come and go, the sand is dragged to form images which are washed away as soon as they appear. We think we see old photographs, but they are gone like their subjects.
Good and Bad at Games (after Michael Andrews) is a video transcription of Andrews’ masterful triptych in which the vicissitudes of individuals’ social fortunes at a party are represented by the inflation or deflation of their balloon-like likenesses on the canvas. The transcription involves digitally applying portraits to virtual balloons which distort as they swirl about one another on the light social breeze. The stagey, figures-before-a-backdrop formula of both the original painting and the digital copy strongly suggest how effectively the subject would translate into the pop-up format of the accompanying book.
John Gillett was ArtSWay’s NavvyGate part-time artist-in-residence in the Digital Media suite at ArtSway between September 2001 and September 2002. The NavvyGate residencies are funded by the Regional Arts Lottery Programme through Southern Arts. John Gillett was trained by the Arts Council of Great Britain as an exhibition organiser, and has curated contemporary visual art shows for many years as Director of the Winchester Gallery, Southampton University.
A full colour catalogue designed by the artist is available from the gallery: John Gillett, Loss of Gravity ISBN 0 9543930 0 7
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