Past exhibitions

8 – 26 October 2007

Sam Taylor-Wood

Pietà, Ascension, Prelude in Air

Three weeks - three films

35 mm film/DVD, 1min 57sec, 2001
8 - 13 October


Ascension
35mm film/DVD, 3min 15sec, 2003
15 - 20 October


Prelude in Air
35mm film/DVD, 3min 51sec, 2005
22 - 26 October

Sam Taylor-Wood makes photographs and films that examine, through highly charged scenes, humankind's physical and emotional boundaries. All her works are full of narrative possibilities yet resist any specific symbolic meaning. Many explore, often employing a wry humour, the relationship between the sacred and profane, fusing religious imagery informed by Renaissance and Baroque painting with the secular, urban and contemporary landscape that the artist herself inhabits.

For this exhibition Wallspace has brought together three distinctive film pieces that include biblical and religious references, and spiritual resonances. They explore ideas of presence and absence, performance and vulnerability. Over the course of the exhibition, we will show one film per week. Each short film will be shown continuously throughout the day.

The first two films make direct reference to traditional, western Christian iconography. Pietà (2001), based on Michelangelo's Vatican sculpture, portrays the artist struggling to hold actor Robert Downey Jr in the pose of the dying Christ. The work demonstrates not only the sense of devastating loss implicit in the original Pieta, but also the dependency of two vulnerable human beings.

In Ascension (2003), a man lies prone while another appears to tap dance on his chest, balancing a white dove on his head. Precariously, the dove stays with the dancing man through every movement, until finally it leaves him, flying off screen. What at first seems an almost literal treatment belies a serious engagement with the reality of mortality and the hope of something beyond.

The third, Prelude in Air (2006), presents a musician who is totally engaged with the Bach prelude he is playing, but he is performing the work without his cello. The music and the man are palpably present; the instrument that links the two is absent.


All images courtesy Jay Jopling/White Cube (London)