A Natureza das Férias

“Little is necessary for everything to appear differently. The date, the hour, the weather, the space's layout, one's glance or presence of mind... can make everything change.” — Rose Lowder

The Nature of Holidays explores the variations in the rhythms and textures of time and place during the summer months through a selection of films that reflect upon, inhabit and play with the oneiric and chimeric “nature” of seasonal spaces of escape.

Offering a vacation in and through the images of others, the exhibition travels from the Argentine beach to Andy Warhol’s Montauk holiday home, via the coasts of France and Thailand, with excursions into software and the Cloud, whilst considering, and remembering, that films have the capacity to take us on little holidays, in and of themselves.

Images of holidays are often synonymous with holidays. This is the season when the most photographs are taken, and shared—it is estimated that 20-30% more images are uploaded to social media platforms over the summer months compared to the rest of the year. But such images can have more than a performative, or postcard, function, and the six artists in this exhibition have something other to share.

Shortly after the passing of her husband JFK, Jackie Kennedy wondered if a camera might offer a diversion for her children in the wake of the family’s tragedy. Jonas Mekas was recommended as the figure to introduce them to cinema, and the “Little Fragments of Paradise” from this period in the late 60s that remain, woven into a cinematic reverie by Mekas decades later at the brink of the millennium, conjure a universal poetry from such personal intimacies and memories.

Through her highly idiosyncratic, and magical, amalgamation of traditions of structural filmmaking and painting en plein air, Lowder weaves individual images into a stuttering, stroboscopic register of the real. Guided by meticulous fieldnotes, like a choreographic score, that mark which images are recorded where and when on an individual role of 16mm film, by advancing and rewinding the film in her mechanical Bolex camera Lowder captures images non-sequentially, one frame at a time, and crafts them into a kind of visual music. If time feels different over the summer months, Lowder’s sun-kissed films perhaps give this sensation form. Voiliers et Coquelicots collapses different landscapes captured over three different months into something like an impossible mirage. For her Bouquets, a series Lowder has now been undertaking for almost 30 years, Lowder focuses on a single site for each numbered ‘bunch’ of pictures, gathering 1,440 individual exposures into one-minute films. Transporting us to these different landscapes, the films could be thought of as filmic surrogates for Lowder’s experience of place, a ‘trip’ (in both senses of the word) to be taken with her.

If holidays are times when the majority of photographs are taken, taking a holiday can also feel like inhabiting an image, something Llinas and Saenjaroen unpack with ebullience. For Llinás, the fantasy of “modern pagan cities given to the worship of the sea” becomes a source of endless, obsessive, fascination, as, like a sardonically bemused beachcomber, he performs a granular sociology of “the multi-purpose stadium of the sand” and the “pharonic cities” built beside it. Full of the exuberant tendencies for labyrinthine fabulation and a meta-cinematic play with genre that would later culminate in Llinás’s gargantuan epic, La Flor (2018), Episodio de las playas is excerpted from the director’s first feature, Balnearios, a ‘documentary’ in four chapters.

For Saenjaroen, the popular image of the Thai resort town of Bangsaen is built upon other projections. It is this artifice his film seeks to both unveil and to inhabit, through its onslaught of digital software aesthetics and automations which distance us ever further from grasping the ‘real’, whilst conversely seeking to examine what lies beyond the frame of images created for, and through, our pursuit of pleasure and leisure in a place preconceived for it.

Perhaps a tourist’s photograph of the sunset over the bay of Bangsaen might form part of Peter Miller’s monumental Set? Maybe it’s a Thai beach that’s the paradisiacal digital backdrop of Petra Cortright’s 911 King? Within this exhibition’s package holiday, Cortright and Miller offer us trips into digital space – a reminder that travel doesn’t require leaving one’s seat, in solidarity, perhaps, with “staycationers” everywhere.

Long before 'selfie' entered the dictionary, and Tik-Tok took over mobile bandwidth, Petra Cortright first gained renown around 2007 in the post-internet art space for her films using consumer webcams. Alongside a burgeoning practice in digital painting, Cortright would use the internet as her work’s medium, source, context and site of distribution, producing digital and physical images through software. As lines in the exhibition blur between fantasy and reality, Cortright gives us two paths to escapism, in a dialogue between her early videos for a YouTube in its infancy and her ever more complex recent digital abstractions. A disembodied camera takes a voyage through the virtual sublime of Cortright’s living landscape painting, wet sunlight Paradis "pomme de terre" 3D, and we are invited along for its ride, whilst in 911 King the artist sends us a postcard from her bedroom, as well as a now very different online time. Meanwhile, transforming other postcards sent into the digital ether, Peter Miller, an artist who as a child dreamed of being a magician and has subsequently dedicated his practice to tricks of conjuring using cinema’s irreducible elements, offers us a sun that flickers with a restless excitement, like rays bouncing off the sea, as it continues its perpetually setting through the animation of 10,000 photos downloaded from the internet.

Maybe visiting an exhibition is also like being a tourist of images. Whilst we invite you to take a break in this one, we wish you happy holidays.