Gregory Stennatt – Figure in Action: Study of an Oriental Dancer (in Red), 2016 – still from video
Digital is now open to the public and will be on view until July 4. Here is a feature on another artist in the exhibition:
Bio
Gregory Stennatt was born in London in 1966, to a Jamaican family. A multi-media artist, specializing in digital film, he describes his works as “moving art images”. He spent over two decades working for a number of television production companies, including the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC), as well as in independent production. In 1999, he obtained a postgraduate degree in Independent Film/Video (Film Theory, History, and Criticism) at University of the Arts, London. In the same year, he co-curated (with Tony Rayns) the award-winning Japanese experimental and video festival Vanishing Points at London’s Institute of Contemporary Arts. Among his many achievements, Stennatt was awarded a 12-month UBS/Daiwa Anglo-Japanese Foundation research bursary to visit Tokyo in 2000, where he continued research into Japanese avant-garde cinema and advised the British Council on Japan-2001, with the idea for a Clubland Japan-UK youth culture collaboration. Presently he lives and works in Tokyo, Japan.
Gregory Stennatt – Figure in Action: Study of a Nude Dancer, 2016 – still from video
About the Work
“The Figure in Action digital film is composed of series of still photographs, having its roots in traditional fine art, but employs a modern time-lapse photographic process to achieve an animated illusion. … The cinemagraph-like pieces in Figure in Action attempt document the sequence of human movement but also reveal visual phenomena that the human eye, unaided, cannot easily perceive. The studies are reminiscent of Eadweard Muybridge’s still photographs of 1878-9, illustrating for the first time repetition or consecutive positions assumed by animals and people in motion. Dynamism of A Dog on a Leash” (1912) by Giacomo Balla, and Nude Descending a Staircase No. 2 by Marcel Duchamp (1912) are examples of artists in the past attempting to capture unseen movement. These paintings and photos depicted movement at a time when cinematography was still in its infancy with (animated flick books) a remnant of the 1886 Kineographs.”
Gregory Stennatt – Figure in Action: Study of a Nude Dancer, 2016 – still from video
“The Figure in Action studies are more like impressionist paintings and drawings than they are HD digital videos. Above all, they defy Western conventions in art and philosophies that dissect and categorise things that were once thought of as connected in African and Caribbean cultures. Figure in Action is part of a body of work that attempts to reconnect ‘the interconnectedness of things,’ and demonstrates a symbiosis between what was once thought of distinct artistic disciplines.”
