Sixteen By Nine
Sixteen by Nine
By Angus Brown
Editioned by Post Office Lane
Screenprinted recreations of 16mm colour film stills.
CMYK water-based ink on 300gsm Fabriano academia paper, framed in artist-made Victorian Ash frames with a natural bee’s wax finish.
880mm x 750mm
Edition of 3
Printed Janurary - March 2022. Framed May 2022.
Hung and Photographed at Sepium, Parkville August 2022.
Released at Post Office Lane x Micro-Labs Pop Up store/ release party 7th October 2022
A heavily process-driven abstraction of incidental video stills captured across a distant summer landscape. Shot on 200D Kodak colour 16mm film stock, through a clockwork driven 1950s B&H 200EE cine camera, this recording was an attempt to dismantle and reload the long expired Kodachrome II film cartridges that this home movie camera once took.
With the pressure plate of the film cartridge not reloaded as tight as it once had been, the abstraction began in-camera as the flickering frames flew through the shutter. Beautifully documenting the shimmering light hitting the film strip, the camera grasped the energy of these vibrating summer scenes in stretched colour, shape and movement. The curious compositions of indistinguishable light are left open to individual interpretation. But, amongst the vast range of organic distortions, there are beautiful moments of recognition and discovery through familiar form.
A selection of these bounced stills have now been reproduced in a four-layer CMYK bitmap image. With the imagery further broken down into its primary pigments, the remaining essence of the stills is truly tested.
Whilst the interaction of the colour between dots rebuilds the images, it layers another level of movement through colour onto an already distant reflection of scapes seen through a camera’s lens... in some sunny season, some time ago. The group of nine selected 16mm stills sit laid out in a grid; named and set out at the common aspect ratio of 16:9.