Booking is essential: please contact danielle@daniellearnaud.com

Doors open at 6pm - the screenings will start promptly at 6.30pm

The event will screen artists videos where the role of music is central. The screenings will be the pretext for a mediated 30 minute discussion about how genres of music and moving image work in relation to experimental artistic video practices, offering a critical lens onto both the production and the reception of work. The event is also a strategy to extract artistic video practices from the white cube to develop curatorial contexts where audiences can engage with video work in new ways.

Mick Finch One Thing After Another 2024
7.07min

The video is made from the image montage for a book entitled One Thing After Another, published by Shibboleth, Milan. It was launched at Printed Matter in NY and the video takes the paratactic sequence of still images as the material for a montage using ‘Ken Burns’ editing methods. The video was used in a presentation about the book and in a showreel in the fair.

The video and the book are an enquiry into how an appropriated set of images, organised as a bounded archive, can be put to work in terms of its own temporality and the materiality of the images and also how it can be applied anachronistically. It explores how appropriation can set up a bounded archive that is not subject to the endlessness of the internet, possessing distinct sets of potentials and productive forces which the Book of Knowledge work explores. Finch’s considerable work on Aby Warburg has informed how the compositional aspects of the work feed through a methodology of collage and montage using digital means in terms of hard copy prints and video and latterly with montage through the book form. This methodology brings to the Book of Knowledge archive an original formal and productive process based on in-depth research on Warburg’s notion of the pathos-formula and how different temporalities are accessed (eg: time of the world/lived time, panoramic time/presentness etc.). The music used for the video uses many of the same qualities as the images. It appropriates a piece of Beethoven's 7th as a loop and layers it with piano and strings that set up the structure of the edit and the key frame movements of the still images.

Mick Finch exhibits his work regularly and internationally.  In 2011 he was an Abbey Fellow in Painting at the British School in Rome and he is a Senior Scholar of the Terra Foundation in Paris.  He is a member of the artistic committee of the Institut Français’ Fluxus Group.  He is also a member of the Faculty of Fine Art of the British School at Rome.  He has written extensively about Aby Warburg and led an AHRC project entitled A Vision for Europe (2019-20) that examined Warburg’s and Fritz Saxl’s photographic practices.  At the University of the Arts, Central Saint Martins, London he is Professor of Visual Art Practice. Since 2014 he has been working on the Book of Knowledge project.  He has scanned some 3000 images from a set of 1950s encyclopedias of the same name.  He has worked with this archive in terms of making digital photo-collage and more recently as video montage.  He also makes the music for the videos, which plays an intrinsic role in the work.  This is not  a memory project but a way of exploring a body of material that is precisely inscribed, limited, locked in its time and its materiality as printed matter and also  open to the present and the future. In April 2024 his artist book, One Thing After Another, published by Shibboleth in Milan, was launched at the Printed Matter art book fair in New York.  Book of Knowledge work has been shown at The Sid Motion Gallery, The Terrace Gallery, The Post Room Gallery and the Art Gazette Gallery.

Alex Schady These are not my dreams 2024
6:00 min

Part of an ongoing set of moving image works in which the relationship between an artist and their work is set to music and performed. These are not my dreams is made as a response to Songs for Dead Sculptures in which Schady sings to his sculptures. For this new work the sculptures are given voice and sing back to the artist asserting their own position. Schady worked with St Georges Panto group who perform the role of artworks within the piece.

Alex Schady is an artist and filmmaker with a broad interdisciplinary practice. His work uses materials immediately to hand, incorporating modern-life ephemera that is manipulated and re-interpreted across a variety of media. Combining craft techniques and digital processes his most recent work uses the language of science fiction to explore the psyche of contemporary culture and the role of the artist within it. He is co-founder of Five Years Gallery an artist-run space that establishes a direct relationship between programming, curation and practice.
Recent projects include Ascension (Koppel Regents Street, London 2024), Take me with you (The Hive, London, 2023) Rulers (Camden Arts Centre, London) and a solo show at Five Years Gallery (Besame Mucho)

Daria Blum Big Baby (I owe you nothing) 2021
HD Video, sound, 7 min

'Freed a spider today.'
Big Baby (I owe you nothing) juxtaposes a musical piece composed by Blum with spontaneously recorded iPhone footage, expanding a simple domestic gesture, or a serendipitous encounter with a spider into full-fledged dramas.

Daria Blum (*1992 CH, based in London) multiplies herself across music, photography, text, video and live performance. Using theatrical devices and autofiction to mythologise her own history as an artist, she suggests how ‘breaking character’ can destabilise entrenched forms of engagement with the world. Blum completed a postgraduate degree from the RA Schools (2019-2023), having previously studied at Central Saint Martins (2014-2017). She has most recently exhibited and performed at Ilenia, London (2024); Roskilde Festival, Denmark (2023); V.O Curations, London (2022) and Piccadilly Lights, London (2022). She is currently artist in residence at CAPC Bordeaux as part of Fluxus Art Project’s Magnetic Residenc

Oona Grimes Etruscan moth 2020
Music by Jem Finer, 4.51 min

Etruscan silk worm moth teasing and tempting a Buster Keatonesque entomologist, choreographing an elusive expedition through the undergrowth.
The hunter or the hunted.

Oona Grimes is a London-based artist, primarily a chaser of language through drawing, clay making and film. During Grimes' 2018 Bridget Riley Fellowship at the Brirtish School at Rome she segued from thieving Lorenzetti tartans and cartoon detail from Etruscan paintings, to the appropriation of neorealist films - mis-remembered, imitated and low tech re-enacted: a physical drawing of herself captured oni-phone.

Mario Rossi In Media Res 2022
Collaborative work made with the Glasgow Improvisors Orchestra
7 min from 30 minute performance

In Medias Res is a collaborative work made with the Glasgow Improvisors Orchestra and was performed live at GioFest at CCA Glasgow in November 2022.The work animates an ongoing archive of cinematic related paintings with visual devices associated with both still and moving image. Mediation is at the core of the work; each sequence weaving image with sound and textural references, as quintessential forms dissolve ever more precipitously into a complete frictionless digital mediascape.

Mario Rossi is a visual artist working across painting and film media. He has contributed to numerous exhibitions that explore the relationship between painting and cinema including: Sideshow Lethaby Gallery 2024, Wastemakers Winchester Gallery 2023, Go On Being So, Newlyn Art Gallery, 2020, As Seen on Screen : Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool 2019. Now, Today ,Tomorrow and Always 2017: Towner Art Gallery Eastbourne. UnSpooling: Artists and Cinema, 2012 Cornerhouse Manchester.

Paulette Phillips Marnie's Handbag 2008
Single-channel video with audio, 10.30 min

Premiering at the Tate Modern on May 08, 2008, Marnie's Handbag was commissioned for London Fashion Week. The video uses appropriated clips from over 50 films that span Hollywood cinema from 1935 to 2007. The ‘behavioural paradox’ in Marnie's Handbag is centred on the signals and signs that are used in the language of film noir cinema. Here we are given a glimpse into the dress codes of the women driven to misbehave. Edited by Dennis Day this is a tour de force of female trouble.

Paulette Phillips’ work deals with the relationship between viewer and subject, focusing on witnessing, looking and reflection. Consistent in her work is an interest in the way psychological content is embedded in the physical world. Over the past thirty years she has worked in visual art, film and theatre and for the past 15 years has primarily focused on sculpture and film installation showing her work primarily in the UK, France and Germany. Her work is in a number of public collections including the National Gallery Canada, Oakville Galleries, the Museum of Modern of Modern Art and Frac, Haute-Normandie and in corporate and private collections including Gluskin Sheff + Associates and BMO Bank of Montreal. Her work is represented by Danielle Arnaud Contemporary Art, London, and Diaz Contemporary, Toronto. Paulette teaches time-based and contemporary art practices at OCAD University.

Louisa Fairclough A Rose 2017
16mm film, 9 min, and a vinyl dubplate recording 20 min

A Rose (2017) has two components in conversation with each other: a 16mm film and a vinyl dubplate recording, both made in a building on the site of a former psychiatric hospital, which is now entangled in vegetation and open to the elements. An upturned shelving unit – shown in the film – provided a platform onto which a lament was performed. Singer Samuel Middleton sang a cluster of words repeatedly that were recorded over-and-over on the same tape loop, creating a composite recording that captures the song resonating through the metal shelves along with the incidental sounds of the environment. This was then pressed onto vinyl dubplate, with the tempo of the song informing the pace of the film. The end words – erase, erase, erase – arise above the rest.

Louisa Fairclough’s work mainly takes the form of film loops, choral performances, field recordings and drawings. She is soon to start work on a second essay film exploring her lived experience of psychosis.

Louisa graduated from the Slade School of Fine Art (MFA Distinction) in 2000. She has since taught at many art colleges, curated a screening and talks programme entitled Mezz from 2009 – 2011 and co-founded Bristol Experimental and Expanded Film in 2015 with the core aim of supporting and nurturing experimental film practice in Bristol.

Louisa’s exhibitions include Contact: Perpetual Possibility at Iklectik, London (2023); Screening of Mental Falls at Danielle Arnaud (2022); Mutations Migrations, Cinema Metamorphosis at Musée Atelier, Nantes, France (2021); Alchemy Film Festival, Hawick, Scotland (2019); A Song Cycle for the Ruins of a Psychiatric Unit – a solo show at Danielle Arnaud, London (2017; VOICE IMAGES at Swiss Church, London (2017); Rojas and Rubensteen Projects, Miami, USA (2017); The Incidental Musicality of a Chance Encounter was a sound installation and new drawings commissioned for the Estuary Festival (2016); BRUCE MCCLURE + SALLY GOLDING + LOUISA FAIRCLOUGH at The Cube Microplex, Bristol (2015); I wish I could be a stone – a solo show at Danielle Arnaud, London (2014); Absolute Pitch and Compositions for a Low Tide commissioned by Whitstable Biennale 2014; Jeannie commissioned by Bristol New Music for the Arnolfini, Bristol (2014); Flecks of a Brighter Colour at ICIA University of Bath; an installation of Song of Grief at Film in Space curated by Guy Sherwin at Camden Art Centre, London (2013); a month-long residency and solo show at Ha gamle Prestegard, Norway (2012); Ground Truth – Louisa’s first solo show at Danielle Arnaud, London (2011) and Deep Grief, a residency at Meantime Project Space, Cheltenham (2011).

Louisa’s work is discussed by Abadie, K. (2023) Humanity Undone: A Practice led Enquiry into Self-Injury (University of Plymouth); Knowles, K. (2020) Experimental Film and Photochemical Practices; Broome, H. (2017) Studio International review of A Song Cycle for the Ruins of a Psychiatric Unit; Lear, R. (2017) This is Tomorrow review of A Song Cycle for the Ruins of a Psychiatric Unit; Baugh, T. (2015) An Artistic Equivalence of my Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (University of Plymouth); Buenfeld-Murley, G. (2014) I wish I could be a stone; Smyth, C. (2011) Cutting the Skin of the Moment; Moloney, C. (2012) This is Tomorrow review of Ground Truth.

Mark Dean The Way Of The Saints 2018-2023
Film and sound, 5 min

The Way of the Saints combines footage from the introductory sequences of various episodes of the 1960’s TV series The Saint with a remix of samples from the 2000 single Black Coffee by All Saints. The technique of combining disparate material linked by a coincidence of names has been used by Dean since Goin’ Back (The Birds/The Byrds x 32 + 1), 1997, and relates to the ancient hermeneutic principle of gezerah shavah formulated by Rabbi Hillel the Elder (although this relationship may also be coincidental).

Mark Dean began looping appropriated film as an art student in the late 1970’s, and in the 1980’s extended this technique into music; these practices were eventually combined in the methodology for which Dean became recognised as a video & sound artist from the 1990’s onwards.

Music has remained an integral part of Dean’s art practice, with looped and layered sound samples often providing the structural basis for video works. This treatment of music as primary material is paralleled by a consistent use of film as objet trouvé; however, Dean’s use of appropriation differs, at least from some of the more reductive interpretations of such work, in that it is based not on a theory of the emptiness of images, but on a theology of kenosis, or self-emptying; a practice grounded in the lived experience of trauma.

In 2021 Dean began publishing video albums on chaplachap records; while referencing vinyl concept albums, they also recall a time when video artists conceptualised a future of dematerialised art, distributed outside of commodification systems. The technology to realise this eventually arrived, but along with it came both a shift in patterns of consumption and a convergence of media, such that ‘video art’ itself may no longer exist except as an art-historical phenomenon; and yet here we are…