AMBruno
Stills
Limited Edition Prints

AMBruno presented a collection of limited edition prints, Stills, on the theme of cinema, at the London Art Book Fair, Whitechapel Art Gallery, London, 26-28 September 2014.

The brief set by John McDowall was 'to produce an editioned print in response to the title Stills. The single instant of a cinema film still, re-materialised from the intangible and ephemeral experience of viewing and recollection, participants' prints might be based on production/publicity photos or a captured frame, or perhaps more intriguingly, their own memory of a film or of an imagined one'.

The Stills artists are: Marco Calí, Claire Deniau, Kathryn Faulkner, Judy Goldhill, Jane Grisewood, Lydia Julien, Sharon Kivland, Sophie Loss, John McDowall, Valérie Mary, Steve Perfect, and Anne Rook.

AMBruno also showed the book collection Lists etc. at the London Art Book Fair, with books by Marco Calí, Kathryn Faulkner, Judy Goldhill, Barbara Greene, Jane Grisewood, Ingrid Jensen, Lydia Julien, Sharon Kivland, Philip Lee, Sophie Loss, John McDowall, Sumi Perera, Steve Perfect, and Anne Rook.

The Stills suite of prints was also shown at Berliner Liste 2014, fair for contemporary art, 18 to 21 September 2014.

AMBruno presented Stills prints by 12 artists.

Marco Calí - 54:44-54:47 As the camera pans, a recreation of a historical moment is shown in the 1968 film The Charge of the Light Brigade. Different time frames are present, that of the moving image, that of the film itself, that of the actors, the historical event being re-created, the setting used in filming, and so on. Screen print on 300gsm Somerset Rag.

Claire Deniau - 25th A form of subliminal messaging involves the insertion of 'hidden' messages into movies for propaganda purposes. Modern theatrical film runs at 24 frames a second. The 25th image is known as the 'subliminal image'. 25th is a subliminal image, an inspiring propaganda, which conveys ideas of beauty, peace and lightness. Drypoint and embossing.

Kathryn Faulkner - After Tarkovsky A seven minute pinhole exposure made at the spa town of Bagno Vignoni in Tuscany, the location for the penultimate scene in Nostalghia by Andrei Tarkovsky. A flickering candle records the journey from one side to the other in homage to the poet Gorchakov's last moments. Pinhole photography / C-type print.

Judy Goldhill - All About Eve? All About My Mother I have restaged my mother's favourite film, All About Eve, with my youngest daughter and mother, so as to create some effectual tension between them. Taking the film's theme where an apparent ingenue insinuates herself into the company of an established, but ageing actress I have re-imagined the film's narrative. C-type colour photograph.

Jane Grisewood - The Dark and the Light (Homage to 'Nostalgia for the Light') A poetic meditation on the past, time and memory, drawing inspiration from Patricio Guzmán's 2010 film, Nostalgia for the Light. Set in Chile's Atacama Desert and observatories in the Andes, where this photograph was taken, the film reveals light/memory parallels ... searching the past to seek answers. Gelatin silver print on Ilford matt fibre-based paper.

Lydia Julien - 5A (The Temporary Object of My Affection) In finding boxes of negatives over 20 years old, an obsession with characters are shown through still after still after still. Often totally seduced with the actor or actress, in shooting the image there was a thick layer of infatuation, yearning to be in the space next to them. Black & white photographic fibre print.

Sharon Kivland - Last Year: The garden and frozen figures with their shadows A single still, the famous scene of the garden and the frozen figures with their shadows, from L'annáe dernière à Marienbad, from which I have erased the figures, leaving only the shadows of where they once may have been supposed to stand, last year. Archival digital print on Hahnemuhle paper.

Sophie Loss - Factum no. 24 In Jean-Luc Godard's film Les Carabiniers a cinema spectator attempts to touch the projected image, only to pull down the screen; both the screen and the paper are sites of collapsed illusion. Digital print and embossing.

John McDowall - Eclipse field The still image, from Michelangelo Antonioni's film L'Eclisse, is made visible solely by means of the shadows cast by the relief of the intaglio impression revealed, as in cinema projection, by light. The film's sparsely occupied urban spaces reflect an erasure of affect, which is, at the end, reduced to a white field of absence. Blind-embossed from an acrylic plate.

Valérie Mary - Re-Momentum My print is based on a memory I have from the movie Stalker by Andrei Tarkovsky, when a girl stands in the middle of a staircase in a place that looks like a grotto. I wanted to re-capture the feeling of uncanny, suspended time I got when I saw it. Copper plate etching and aquatint.

Steve Perfect - The Night Man In A Touch of Evil (dir. Orson Welles 1958) there is a scene where a motel night manager, who calls himself 'the night man', is pursued outside and clings fearfully to a tree. After seeing the film the image remained in my mind. Subsequenty I found a photo of myself with a tree. The images became linked. Silver gelatin print.

Anne Rook - Blackboards Blackboards is based on a reconstructed memory of a still from the beginning of 'The Blackboard' by Iranian film-maker Samira Makhmalbaf. Itinerant teachers, fleeing from endless contradictory conflicts, carry the tools of their interrupted trade. The blackboards, crawling up a mountain, are knowledge, its transmission, its rejection, its erasing. Linocut, printed on heavy-weight watercolour paper.