01/05/13
Stefana McClure: Science is Fiction
Bartha Contemporary
29 March – 11 May 2013
Advocating the belief
“science is fiction,” the early 20th century French marine
biologist and cinema pioneer, Jean Painlevé (1902 –1989), directed over 200
science and nature films, including a number shot underwater. He has been
credited with single-handedly establishing a unique kind of cinema, known as the
“scientific-poetic cinema”. For her current exhibition at Bartha
Contemporary, Northern Irish born artist Stefana McClure, who now lives and
works in New York, has captured 23 of Painlevé’s films as stills on paper, by
meticulously copying the subtitles on to wax transfer paper, and mounting them,
line upon line, stacked successively, until the words become obscured and the
meaning hidden. At the same time, a new meaning appears: partly the original,
but with the word becoming image, and the voices speaking through a new tongue.
With material lost as information is added, the paper eroding, and the
graphemes merging into lines of light, all that remains by the end of the
transcription process is a monochrome colour surface, with two white bands
across the bottom. Even without knowing how these works were made, or to what
they refer, the viewer might well be inspired to think of an ocean’s waves, and
the white spume on each one’s crest.
Image:
Stefana McClure
Science is FICTION
No 9 The Vampire
2012-13
Wax transfer paper mounted on rag
27.8 x 32cm