FlatScreen: Kate Allen – Nineteen thirty-six

31 May – 15 July 2011

Tuesday – Friday, 11am-5pm

Canteen Gallery 2: FlatScreen

This enigmatic short film, Nineteen thirty-six, speaks of history – of art, architecture and gender politics.

The visual components on the screen incorporate a variety of media: text, digital video, 35mm black and white photographs and digital reproductions of five paintings.

Women – Jessica Dismorr, Helen Saunders and Dorothy Shakespeare – who were associated with British Vorticism, an international art movement active in the early years of the twentieth century, painted all the reproduced art works. The video footage was shot at Crystal Palace Park, the photographs document the interior of Kenwood House on Hampstead Heath and the text written by the artist.

In bringing the four elements together, each represents or stands in for something that is absent in the others. For example, the interior of the house stands in for the interior of the destroyed Crystal Palace, the Crystal Palace Park as the imagined site of the paintings last exhibition. The sites and objects are brought together by the fictional text, with the paintings, only ever represented in the film by reproductions, acting as the characters of the plot.

Kate Allen is a London-based artist. Graduating from BA (Hons) Fine Art at Sheffield Hallam University in 2003, she subsequently moved to London and in 2010 completed an MA in Fine Art from Central Saint Martins School of Art and Design. Previous exhibitions include, Kate Allen / Chris Clarke, The Woodmill (Project Space), London; Fifteen, S1 Artspace, Sheffield; Re:Animate, Oriel Davies, Newtown, Wales; Making Fact, Making Fiction, National Glass Centre, Sunderland; Hidden Narratives, Graves Art Gallery, Sheffield; The Disaster Area, Bloc Space, Sheffield. In Sheffield, Kate was active in the studio group S1.

Programmed all the year round with new or seminal work from artists working with moving image, FlatScreen is the digital plane in Canteen Gallery 2 that allows us to move fast and react to new possibilities.