Opening
Academy of Fine Arts Vienna
Great Hall | Schillerplatz 3
1010 Vienna
Phone (+43 1) 588 16-0
http://www.akbild.ac.at
With “The Fight” and “Prater Hauptallee, Dawn and Dusk,” the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna presents Mark Lewis’s most recent works, produced in the context of an art project with students at the Academy’s Research Lab for Film and Television. In his photographs and films, Mark Lewis, born in Hamilton, Canada, in 1958 and living in London today, explores the structure and imagery of the cinema. Both for his 35 mm films and his color photographs, he relies on the formal means of expression and the technical, logistic apparatus of the film industry. His work reflects on the visual power and the codes of moving images examining their historical relationship to the depictive arts, while at the same time examining conventional filmic devices.
Mark Lewis: “I shot The Fight using the process of rear projection. Rear projection was a familiar filmic process from the 1930’s up until the 1960’s, and its introduction into Hollywood films had practical advantages: it allowed the stars of films to appear as if they were on locations or in moving vehicles when they were in fact on sound stages. But it might be useful to consider this moment, the moment when film finally ‘understood’ that it could put itself inside of itself, as the moment when the medium become truly modern and when it achieved, almost without knowing, a modernist form every bit as inventive and startling as similar achievements in the fields of painting and photography.”
In his Viennese productions, for which he used the HDCAM format for the first time, he focused his research interest on the process of rear projection and its potential “to produce both illusion and a modernist montage of different perspectival spaces.”
Kunsthalle Wien shows two films by the artist as part of the exhibition “Western Motel. Edward Hopper and Contemporary Art,” to be seen until 15 February 2009.
Le Grand Café, Centre d’art contemporain, in Saint-Nazaire, France, presents a solo one-man show dedicated to Mark Lewis until 30 November 2008. Lewis will represent Canada at the 2009 Venice Biennial.
Image above:
Copyright Mark Lewis: Backdrop for “The Fight”, 2008, high definition video, 5 minutes and 31 seconds, production of the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna, Courtesy Mark Lewis and galerie serge le borgne, Paris
For more information go to: http://www.akbild.ac.at