Deborah S. Phillips

texts about the event @ Alchemy festival, by Michael Pattison (& a link to Ben Nicholson’s in Sight & Sound)

Here’s the link to a super contribution to Sight & Sound about the festival in Scotland: https://www.bfi.org.uk/news-opinion/sight-sound-magazine/comment/festivals/alchemy-2019-film-arts-festival-hawick-scottish-borders-report?fbclid=IwAR3o7ZHV3ArTuYnbyxo7liUBFUrygUFo0dcK9EP1XJxO_NvahzV_lJwx40c

The author, Ben Nicholson, really seems to have understood the 3 colours of light cycle!

This is the text that the new director of the Alchemy festival wrote about my work for their catalogue: Based in Berlin, Phillips has dedicated more than ten years of research to colour: more specifically, to red, blue and green. By turns associative and direct, the films in this programme are beguiling in their concentration. These works, exercises in maximalism, promote image as theme, form as subject matter, music as character. Allusive and elusive, they are encyclopaedic by sheer force. Plants, animals, spices, objects, ornaments, varnished fingernails: all of these, and more, are unified (collated, superimposed, juxtaposed) by hue.

Capsicum amalgamates, encapsulates, exorcises Phillips’ fascination with red. Its making, the story behind it, sees the German artist haunted by the red heifer – sacrificial subject of the Torah story she read aloud at her Bat Mitzvah as a 12-year-old. T’chelet, by contrast, finds its roots in the fourth Book of Moses: a reference to a shade of blue that cannot be defined. Involving additional slide projection, film loops and audience interaction, T’chelet is at once stunningly comprehensive and suitably incomplete in its search for and investigation into all things blue.

With Im Grünen Bereich, Phillips turns her attention to green, overlaying handwritten notes – words, wordplay – atop images of vegetables, bottles, grass. Exhaustive but never exhausting, the film unfolds as an unpredictable entity, as if some colour-coded reference system has acquired sentience. Tornasolada Sororidad Dada is iridescent: yellow. In it, objects are arranged, sorted, indexed: a pileup of tones. Again, the idea of a self-curating system persists: these films are authored in such a way that they appear otherwise – as self-contained units of meaning. They operate relationally: like colours, each takes meaning from the others.

Colour is music. For her first film, Untitled Colourmation, Phillips collaborated with Wolfgang in der Wiesche, the painter and musician with whom she worked again on Santoor, her loving portrait of Indian santoor player Nandkishor Muley. Come for the collage and stop-motion, stay for the tunes: Santoor is joyously rhythmic and endlessly joyous – an ode to an ancient instrument.

Michael Pattison

Kommentare deaktiviert für texts about the event @ Alchemy festival, by Michael Pattison (& a link to Ben Nicholson’s in Sight & Sound)

Eingeordnet unter Kunst, analog /analogue art