“In my work there has always been a direct relationship between two components: the idea and its production. The production apsect is the result of my fascination with the technical nexus between stills and video, and the failure of either medium to capture either an elusive truth or the essence of my front-of-lens collaborators. In my current show I’ve harnessed a technique that crosses stills and video to explore power, ecstasy and mortality. I have been working with internationally-ranked hiphop dancers and tricksters, who arch across different landscapes in an attempt to flee from gravity for a short time.
Making of…
“The exhibition is called La petite mort (a little death) which is a French phrase describing the small melancholy after orgasm. In the same way the descent to earth from the ecstasy of weightlessness is a little death as we approach the realities of earth bound mortality. My Masters degree was an exploration of cinematic approaches to portraiture, and for this current exhibition I have built a special lighting rig that allows me to shoot bursts of 40 still frames in 4 seconds as the dancers move across the frame. These images are then composited into large format prints (90cm x 160cm) and video works. The show runs from 8th – 19th December at DEPOT GALLERY, 2 Danks St Waterloo ” – Hamish Ta-mé.
