Emma Bennett new paintings

Stuart Croft Rococo 55 new film

 

 

  

  Emma Bennett  Exit #4  2002
  oil and French enamel on MDF
  15 x 20 cm 

 

 1 November to 15 December 2002

 

 

Emma Bennetts new paintings are marked by formal beauty, art historical references and images of death.

 

Stuart Crofts new five-part film Rococo 55 is a panorama of tragicomic desperation that explores the limits of narrative potential.

 

In Emma Bennetts new series of game paintings, images of hunted rabbits, partridges and deer are isolated from the works of seventeenth century painters such as Chardin, Oudry and Weenix. These charged, powerful icons of dead animals are re-positioned in void-like fields of acidic, saturated colour. Bennetts recently completed Exit series focuses on glimpses of women caught in vulnerable situations, each of them captured by fleeting cinematic light. Both series result in intense and disquieting images, reverberating with loss and desire.

Stuart Crofts 40-minute film Rococo 55 crosses the realms of video art and cinema. The film tracks the chaotic sex lives and willful self-destruction of a male escort, an art-house porn director, a posse of weekend actors and four maladjusted Samaritans. Each of them surface amidst Wild West film shoots, modernist hotels, morally deficient call-centres and the US Civil War. Rococo 55 features five separately made short films, brought together in an innovative and compelling editing structure that layers, reverses and loops each component short. Replete with illogical encounters, impossible phone conversations and implausible murders, Rococo 55 is Crofts most ambitious work to date.

 

Emma Bennett - recent exhibitions include: Art Brussels 2002, Brussels Expo; A Month in the Garden, The Museum of Garden History/Danielle Arnaud, London (2001); Bittersweet, Danielle Arnaud Gallery, London (2001); Unchaperoned, Aroma Project Space, Berlin (2001); Artissima 2000 Danielle Arnaud at Turin Art Fair, Turin; acrebarparc, Proposition Gallery, Belfast (1999); Blink, Princelet Street, London (1999).

 

Stuart Croft - recent exhibitions/screenings inlcude: 2002 Sydney Biennale, Art Gallery of New South Wales; B-Hotel, P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center, New York (2002); Commotion, Arnolfini Cinema, Bristol (2002); Tooth Fairy Retribution Manifesto,Debs & Co Gallery, New York (2001); All We Need is a Preacher, Galerie La Friche, Marseille (2001);Fido TV, Hunter Times Square Gallery, New York (2000); 2000 Greenwich Film Festival, London; The Parallax Hotel, Chelsea Inn Hotel, New York (2000); VideoSpin, The Photographers Gallery, London (2000); Projection, Gasworks Gallery, London (1999); 1999 European Media Art Festival, Osnabrck; Post-Neo Amateurism, Chisenhale Gallery, London (1998)

 

Production of Rococo 55 supported by London Arts and VMI Broadcast Ltd. in association with Chisenhale Gallery, London.

Installation View

Rococo 55 Review

Information on purchasing a copy of the limited edition DVD of Rococo 55

 

Stuart Croft
Rococo  55  2002  video still