Usually projected as a loop, Mark Lewis’ films show fragments of encounters in urban areas, from driving through the countryside of his Canadian homeland to dilapidated modernist architecture systems of social housing in London. His work expands the exploration of historical and contemporary cinematic techniques while avoiding the classic narrative threads in favor of isolated, stretched moments. Lewis reflects the visual power and the codes of moving images resulting in equally critical review or homage towards cinematic narratives.
Pull Focus: Gasometer
Pull Focus: Gasometer shows how illusion and reality are interchangeable. It is engaged with ideas around movement and stillness, and with the different ways that a work of art can be both experienced in time and in turn can represent time. Lewis‘ work highlights, through film, that what is always present in a great pictorial work of art is a depiction embedded in a complex relationship to time.
Canada/UK 2010, video installation, HD, silent, 2 minutes
Courtesy Gallery Serge Le Borgne, Paris and mark lewis studio
Willesden Laundrette: Reverse Dolly, Pan Right, Friday Prayers
The four compositions in Willesden Laundrette: Reverse Dolly, Pan Right, Friday Prayers are joined together in a single shot using a motion control rig. In the first composition a woman is folding clothes in the launderette, in the second the camera focuses on a reflection in the windows above the building, in the third, a shifty looking man waits (presumably for drugs), and in the fourth Muslim men pour out into the street from their Friday prayers at a mosque. The contrast between detail and panoramic views, between stasis and movement creates its own rhythm of time and space that is different to narrative cinema.
Canada/UK 2010, video installation, HD, silent, 4 minutes
Courtesy Gallery Serge Le Borgne, Paris and mark lewis studio
Mark Lewis, born 1957 in Hamilton, Canada, lives and works in London (UK). In the 1980s, he studied with Victor Burgin and worked with Laura Mulvey, which influenced his later approach to cinema and video. He is co-editor of the publisher Afterall and teaches at Central Saint Martins in London. Mark Lewis represented Canada at the 2009 Venice Biennale.
Contact: www.marklewisstudio.com
