The image starts as one. A flame dances, a shuffling beat rises. There’s a door and through it emerges a smoky train driving, evaporating into a mythic light. A soundtrack of unknown yet familiar sonancy plays, chugging like the heart of the train towards some equally unknown yet familiar destination. The screens multiply to a three-way and we are on that journey, captivated by a narrative that hints and dives, reveals and dissolves, mirrors, plays at shadows. A man pushes a test button, children smile, birds fly, soldiers march, drips of water fall shattering silence in a time-forgotten train shop, and a monumental black locomotive devours the screen in a dramatic eclipses of pure white daylight. The soundscape becomes a riot and then runs softly delirious as the scenes flip and shift, becoming contained by digitally sculpted wheels and then pushed beyond visual limits. You are on the train moving, you are off the train watching, you are on the tracks walking, you are alone in the warehouse waiting…
This exhibition, Train Dreams, not only evokes a certain vulnerability related to our human existence, it also offers up a challenging visual expression of memory through film.
Sometimes concurrent exhibitions are extremely divergent in their curatorial premise, but our spring exhibitions actually choreograph a larger whole. Carolyn Riddell’s exhibition Raw Footage pushes “past the boat of time” towards a similar distillation of the ephemeral. Riddell’s exhibition is composed of physical things – fabrics and threads and paint and nail polish – and yet they are intangible as metaphors, allusions to time, memory, and place. “Past the boat of time” we stand beyond all worldly trappings, beyond endemic borders, transported through intense iterations of colour into the depth, within the pulsing oceanic wake, of utterly spiritual transmissions.
Two completely different visual installations, two completely different mediums, yet these exhibitions offer a beautifully serendipitous holistic harmony.
Time, memory, place, journey.
Resonance.
~ Aidan Ware, Director & Curator
Train Dreams and Raw Footage open at Gallery Stratford on Sunday, April 13 from 1pm to 3pm (free to join). The exhibitions run until July 6, 2014.
Gallery Strat Chat 