Miniatures
11 x 8mm
Overscan: 16 x 9mm
Frame 13 x 13 cm, $300
or 
Frame 100cm x 100cm, $1100.

Celluloid 16mm still frames presented as backlit framed artworks. Maintaining the image size of 11 x 8mm, frames vary from 10cm x 10cm to 1m x 1m.

 

It is by adapting 16mm moving image film into still images that I hope to attest to the power that a still cinematic image may harbour when isolated. When cutting 16mm film by hand I look over thousands of miniature stills, these deserve to be deeply and artistically considered. Much as Deleuze considers cinema as a series of time-images, the cinematic still image at once oscillates between itself and the contextual whole. What may at first be perceived as moving image can be deduced to a single frame which may come to represent an arresting moment of complex meaning - different to that of its animate nature. Presenting still moments taken from moving image expands such artworks into a cinematic realm that contradicts the notion of the image in isolation. This tension between isolation and the whole is intrinsically human (eg. subjective vs. societal), as well as a cinematic/ photographic dichotomy.

Intimacy in the series is played with here through scale; drawing us close we must use a loupe or magnifier to view the true-to-size 16mm still frame prints - the image is just 11mm x 8mm in size. Contrarily, the blown up large scale photo prints act as an absurd reflection of hyperbole and imagination that fiction creates. Our world is constructed of myth and stories, these works lean into the exaggerated forms of fiction, likewise exaggerating time and scale.