GREGORY BENNETT

Two Rooms presents a collection of film works by five video artists.  These include Clinton Watkins, Gregory Bennett and Judy Darragh from the Two Rooms stable along with invited artists Dorota Mytych (Poland) and Alex Monteith.

The artists in this exhibition use a variety of visual media to create their film works. Techniques utilised include computer animation, slow motion capture, drawing and painting that are looped in long or short sequences.   Although the subject matter is diverse and methodologies range from high to low tech, common themes and interests emerge from these abstracted works. The artists are concerned with a visual representation of time or motion. Filmed sequences abstract reality, controlling and disassembling the workings of time, and the mechanics of movement.  Time is not only a dimension that moves forward, but repeats, dissolves and moves backwards.  These mesmerising works attempt to capture and emphasise that elusive point between one discrete moment and the next.

Gregory Bennett’s animations explore the ergonomics of the human body through the rhythms of movement and the idiosyncrasies of computer rendering. By keeping his work stripped back to the barest essentials, he not only presents a bustling study of bodily motion reminiscent of Eadward Muybridge’s early photographic studies or Leonardo da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man, but also the quirky malfunctions that result from translating human ergonomics into computer programming. Marching in tight formations only possible in the electronic realm, Bennett’s work resembles the kaleidoscopic-choreography of Busby Berkley’s Broadway spectacles. Slight shifts between each performer produces spiraling phasing patterns that visually mimic the way sound-waves also interact when slightly out of sync, a phenomenon often exploited by experimental composers.