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Veronica Crockford-Pound, still from Still life with three salmon steaks, 2008. DVD. Courtesy of the artist.

 

Veronica Crockford-Pound

21 September - 12 October 2009 in the Square² Gallery
After Francisco Goya: Still life with three salmon steaks / After van Eyck, Portrait of a Man (Self Portrait?)
duration: 4 minutes, 50 seconds / 4 minutes, 21 seconds, both looped
2008
DVD
Courtesy of the artist

Veronica Crockford-Pound’s films stage scenes which offer us different ways of looking. These paired works take well known oil paintings and ‘perform them’, slightly altered, as single-shot films. Almost but not quite perfectly still, through minimal shifts or variations they disturb our expectations of them as paintings, yet the movements recorded are so subtle we may barely register them. The artist writes ‘I see film as a slight vibration in the air’, and her works observe and explore the relationship between the ‘wet, fleshy and weighty’ medium of paint and the less tangible character of film, as an image made up of light.

After Francisco Goya: Still life with three salmon steaks appropriates the 19th century painting and introduces a cat, which inevitably begins to hungrily devour the ‘still life’. The film setting is at once more and less credible than the original work, and corrupts the idea of a masterpiece as a sacrosanct document, frozen in time. After Andrei Tarkovsky: ‘Solaris', 42:52. Bruegel, ‘Winter’ zooms in to focus on one detail of a larger scene, allowing us to contemplate a tiny bird winging across the landscape, which is almost invisible in the original. After van Eyck, Portrait of a Man (Self Portrait?) is revisited, featuring the filmmaker’s father in the sumptuous red turban familiar from Van Eyck’s oil painting. The model appears weary, nodding and blinking throughout the film, reminding us that we are watching a live subject. Counterpoising painting and film, these works suggest a separation between the two: ‘while painting is bound up in substances (the earth) film emanates from the sky, using the immaterial substance of light to trace its objects.’[1]

Veronica Crockford-Pound graduated with First Class Honours from Elam School of Fine Arts in 2008. She has previously exhibited at Window and Gus Fisher Gallery in Auckland, as well as The Engine Room in Wellington.

[1] Excerpt from The Lemon and The Glass (2009), by Veronica Crockford-Pound.