Misdirect Movies

Rosa Barba, Andrew Bracey, Dave Griffiths, Cathy Lomax,
Elizabeth McAlpine, David Reed and John Rimmer

Exhibition: 5 July to 3 August 2013

Misdirect Movies is a touring exhibition that explores new possibilities of collage using material gleaned from cinema. It will be opening at Standpoint Gallery in London on 5 July 2013 after premiering at The Royal Standard in Liverpool. It will also be touring to Greyfriars Gallery, Lincoln and Meter Room, Coventry. The exhibition showcases seven national and international artists: Rosa Barba, Andrew Bracey, Dave Griffiths, Cathy Lomax, Elizabeth McAlpine, David Reed and John Rimmer. Dave Griffiths and John Rimmer will be showing new commissions made for Standpoint Gallery .

The art in this visually exciting group exhibition continues the lineage of collage; to cut up, reposition and (re)arrange cinema's near endless supply of imagery. Orson Welles' unfinished version of Don Quixote features a scene where Quixote slashes at a screen in a cinema. This scene acts as a lynchpin for the ideas contained within the curatorial strategy of this exhibition, expanding on the notion of Quixotic, intertexturality and the slippage of reality and illusion.

This exhibition has developed from the research interests and artworks of the curators, Andrew Bracey and John Rimmer. They both employ digital collage with cinematic imagery to produce and play with new forms and received meaning. All the selected artists explore these ideas in diverse ways to work with narrative and new forms of materiality. With the access to digital formats, of the internet and the digitalisation of film, artists are now able to appropriate films to create different and innovative approaches to collage. The exhibition features a wide range of media, from projections and monitor based work through to digital prints, painting and even a microfiche viewer. .

The artists bridge the analogue and the digital, working with both the two modes. Rosa Barba is a Italian born artist, currently living in Berlin who will exhibit every issue of Printed Cinema. This series of artist's books has been published alongside her film projects, as a form of secondary literature, sourced from film stills, text and photographs. Manchester based artist Dave Griffiths' recent work dwells on the physical and fictive borders of cinema, often employing the projectionist's cue dot to activate the narrative potential of marginal images. Cathy Lomax keeps an ongoing visual diary of all the films that she has watched, selecting one image from each to make into a small, rapidly executed painting. Elizabeth McAlpine's film compiles the footage that a viewer did not see as they watched the Nicolas Roeg's cult thriller Don't Look Now, due to them blinking. The New York based painter David Reed's animation references John Ford's western The Searchers. It also recalls an earlier personal experience where the artist had accidently discovered a cave used in the actual film.

The exhibition is supported by Grants for the Arts, Arts Council England.