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Being In Time : The Video Portrait In New Lands [Solo exhibition including a video installation and photographic images]

'Being In Time’ (video portrait installation) builds on the methods established in ‘Adagio No.8’. Here presented as an invited solo exhibition at the Redtory Gallery, Beijing, a major publically funded gallery situated in the 798 Art District (http://www.798district.com/). The work addresses one of my core research questions ‘should portraiture be static?’ It investigates the tension between movement and stasis by presenting the viewer with both the moving portrait, and alongside it the 24 static images that constituted its construction.

The work encourages the viewer to consider the contrast between the portrait spread out in an expanded form and thereafter consolidated as time-based video. The originality of my research into video portraiture consists in its examination of traditional portraiture, its structures, forms, and presentations. The intention was to demonstrate - like viewing all of Rembrandt’s portraits side by side – how the likeness of someone can be radically transformed over a short span of time measured in this instance by the time taken to walk from the start of the exhibition's photographic sequence to the end.

Time can be incorporated into a moving portrait. Here, however, time in portraiture requires the motile participation of viewer. My portraits were also included in the National Portrait Gallery’s ehibition ‘Poetry of Motion’ (June 12–February 2013), and in ‘Moving Portraits’, alongside works by Andy Warhol and Tracey Emin at the De la Warr Pavilion, works that have ‘expanded the language and notion of the portrait genre’ (http://www.dlwp.com/event/moving-portraits).