LONDON.- Laura Bartlett is pleased to presenting Light Reading, a solo exhibition by Elizabeth McAlpine, featuring three series of works, including a new video projection, on view for the first time. United by the artist’s interest in the limits of representation, these works offer an alternative viewing experience by prioritising medium over narrative, emphasising, at all times, the sheer materiality of film. Well versed in the tradition of ‘expanded cinema’ and the structuralist filmmaking of the 1960s and 1970s, McAlpine counters the common language of cinema, combining notions of kinesis and plasticity to present a kind of kinematic ‘cineplastics’, with her projections - in particular - manifesting as ‘events’.

McAlpine’s recent series, Ends (Sprayed Sound) consists of a number of synaesthetic C-Type prints made from the terminal ‘ends’ of a film reel, layered, rather than arranged side by side. Here, the viewer is presented with a photographic ‘instant’, as a once moving image is made static, and a once collective film strip made singular, by the condensation of each layer of 35mm film (0.0416 of a second) into one composite whole. The specific ends become abstract beginnings, folded by the artist into concertinas of nostalgia and critique. Curtains of colour bleed through the margins, evoking the blotted paper of a litmus test, all the while referencing the history of twentieth century art – from post-painterly Abstraction, to Dada, and Fluxus. The colour comes from the part of the film strip that records the sound, endowing the works with a sensory quality, as their titles suggest. The ends possess the ghosts, the remnants of the footage - the ‘cinematic sediment’ of human interaction; the ends record the accidents, the scratches and abrasions – the memory of a previous image: a readymade, made new.

These grazes can also be seen to litter the surface of Light Reading (Californian Sunset) as flecks of dust flicker noisily upon a background of shifting, sunset hues. As the film transitions from yellow through red, to blue, snippets of sound interrupt the gradation, blinking with a temporal tick, as the darkness grows. As with Ends (Sprayed Sound), the film is made using found 35mm footage – this time from trailers for feature length films. As such, it echoes an earlier work from 2005, called simply Light Reading, in which the artist condensed 1,500 frames into one minute of pure light from explosions in narrative films.

In The Raid (101 minutes), McAlpine addresses depth, length, and time by arranging a 35mm film from the eponymous movie into a series of photograms, measuring 20 metres in length. Displayed on the wall, each frame has been grouped to create seven vertical towers, recalling the skyscraper at the heart of the film. Through this compilation, McAlpine again stunts the film’s narration, drawing attention to its own vertical materiality; stacked and stripped from the context of the cinema, the analogue machinery provides the viewer with a system for ordering time. Rather than superimposing the frames, McAlpine arranges them spatially, so that when observed from afar, they take on the volumetric form of a Minimalist sculpture or wall drawing. This serves to highlight the elusive nature of the filmic medium, as past, present, and future, are held together by McAlpine - side by side, vertically stacked and superimposed.