Dani McKenzie | Seeing Seeing
19 July – 18 August 2018
Reflecting upon her recent residency at la Cité Internationale des Arts in Paris, Dani McKenzie’s current work is an investigation into the complex relationship between image and time, painting and the film image. Working predominantly from 8mm home movies collected from flea markets around Paris, McKenzie’s work questions what it means to paint an image that represents movement. Re-contextualising the fragments of forgotten histories through contemporary painting, the works as a whole seem at first to imply an historical narrative and then to immediately frustrate or deny it. Removed from the context of other frames on a filmstrip, the movement of th image dissolves into the fluidity of paint. Painting, in this instance, works to slow down the act of looking, drawing it out in time and making it conscious of itself, its own inconclusiveness. Fluctuating between modes of abstraction and representation, between form and content, between the instantaneous time of the film image and the much slower time of painting, the subjects regain unfamiliarity, and without a narrative to fall back on, we begin to recognise ourselves seeing.
