films made with nine cameras
nov. 7th, nov. 27th 2010, woldgate woods
woldgate woods, 11.30 am and 9.30 am
Image © David Hockney. All Rights Reserved.
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From: David Hockney - A Bigger Picture, UK Book.
20.01.12: film details
'We see space through time. When you're seeing the nine-camera videos of Woldgate, it's a different time in the top right-hand corner from what it is in the left-top corner Just as it is in real life for you.'
David Hockney speaking to to Marco Livingstone, 23 and 24 November 2010
Both aspects of this piece celebrate English weather. The left is a visit down 'The Tunnel' on an autumnal morning full of rustic colours, of gold and of olive. A weak blue sky tries to glimpse through the vast branches. Less than three weeks later we come to the right piece where heavy snow has made the almost exact spot a kind of huge oneness, a whiteness envelops almost everything. White and the uniform colour of the path and the trees has rendered the classic autumnal scene but a memory.
The passage of time. Time spent.
Of course seen in the entirety of Hockney's career, the use of multi-cameras is a natural progression from the classic Hockney photocollage 'joiners'. Indeed much of this recent work can be seen that way. He is the master at manipulating whatever media he is working in to reinvent or recreate how the eye sees it. Perspectives, reverse perspectives, frustrated by single perspectives ... it's is at the core of his work. Here, in 2007 he began experimenting with nine synchronised video cameras attached to a rig on his jeep and with his assistants drove slowly and filmed first one side of the road, and then the other side, before joining them together. The result was that landscapes seen through nine cameras are an alien world to those seen with a single camera.
The resulting footage was first shown simultaneously on eighteen screens prior to the Royal Academy exhibition mentioned below.
Text: Paul Page, 2012
20.01.12: a bigger picture book & exhibition
David Hockney - A Bigger Picture, UK Book.
Accompanies the acclaimed 2012 Royal Academy Exhibition. Details: here. Details: exhibition.
Book Available: Amazon.co.uk
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