SEAMUS HARAHAN & CHRISTOPHER STEWART
2013-07-08Seamus Harahan’s films are studies of human behaviour. Harahan sets up his camera and often uses a long, single take, as if from CCTV, focusing on a particular human activity being performed at a distance. The activity remains inexplicable: two young men making semaphore signals across a river, in Blue Eyes; while in Cold Open, a group of teenage children scuffling and idling in the middle of a busy road. Harahan scrutinizes the activity, occasionally zooming back as though to provide further clues, to locate and context the behaviour. As the artist puts it, he ‘maps emotional and intellectual spaces.’
In the new work at Gimpel Fils, Torch (extended), we observe a figure lurking among bushes in a road of terraced houses. The long-range viewpoint moves back and forth, keeping the man’s balding head in view. He is a university bookbinder tending his premises frontage and continuing to trim the hedge of his student neighbour’s garden, although his suit and tie do not lend themselves to this. Harahan mediates this seemingly strange act of urban vanity and altruism, soundtracked by Marc Almond and Cindy Ecstasy singing of the tentative signs of new love, displacing again any simple, single narrative.
Christopher Stewart’s photographs, from his Insecurity series, deal with a subject familiar to the artist: personnel from security companies and covert operators. Photographed alone or in small groups, isolated in sombre rural or strange urban settings, it is hard to know whether the protagonists are acting out their tasks, or simply awaiting orders. That the act of preparation in the photographs takes place in the ready made environments of familiar city streets, motels, parking lots and shopping malls, simply adds to the verisimilitude of the mileu he photographs.
Exhibition runs through till July 27th, 2013
Gimpel Fils
30 Davies Street
London
W1K 4NB
