Mark Aerial Waller (Born in High Wycombe, UK in 1969, lives and works in London)’s work integrates objects, video and live performance for an experience of video defined in spatial and situational terms. The spectator, art object and its relative position in space and time become an interdisciplinary medium. His feature length film, Time Together (2012), combines daily solar data with local events around the making of a thriller film series, bringing expansive, cosmic scale perception into close proximity with a fictional scenario, set within a documentary environment. Across all Waller’s oeuvre is a consistent questioning of ideas around the transmission and interpretation of culture across time.
To the side of his studio practice, Waller founded The Wayward Canon (2001-onwards), as an artist-led platform for event-based interventions in cinematic practices. It considers how an artist’s work may be ultimately displaced, or transformed by its cross-fertilisation with the work of predecessors and contemporaries. Recent solo presentations include El Canon Rebelde (2020) at CAAM, Gran Canaria, Yoga Horror at Tate Britain (2014) and Projection Apprentice at Mindaugas Triennial, the 11th Baltic Triennial of International Art, CAC Vilnius, Lithuania (2012) and Kafe Pittoresk- L’Experience du Monde Visionnaire, (With Giles Round) Serpentine Gallery, London. Translations of his works exist in French, Italian, Spanish, Lithuanian, Turkish, Korean & Mandarin.
During his residency at LUX Mark will undertake the following research project inspired by the work of filmmaker Owen Land.
The Laughing Cavalier. Owen Land in the 22nd Century
‘George Landow, also known as Owen Land, Orphan Morphan and Apollo Jize (1944-2011) could be rearranged as a Woolen Dagger or A Glowed Goner. His work was irreverent, intellectual and dangerous. It remains a key part of the history of avant garde film but has struggled to find its place in a broader cultural history. Landow’s early film Flemming Falloon (1963/64) was accompanied by this statement:
Landow proposes that if we accept the reality offered to us by the illusion of depth on the flat plane of the screen, we can then assign reality to anything at will. A cinematic equivalent of the illusionistic portraiture of the Flemish painters.
I went with a friend to see Frans Hals, the Flemish portrait show at the Wallace Collection last week. The small exhibition space was walled up with cheeky looking men, painted in Hals’ style of wet-on-wet brush strokes, in a limited pallet, with no attempt to hide the mark of the brush, yet still representing his sitters with convincing vitality. Landow’s film, a series of male portraits, were infused with light spills during processing and reproduced picture-in-picture, the material was evident, kind of cheeky in a high humour way, but also deeply serious, just as that Flemish painter may seem.
My friend told me reproduction Frans Hals Cavaliers found themselves in the front rooms and hallways of working class families in 1980s Britain, coincidently when The Laughing Cavalier was used by McEwan’s beer as its logo. He said its the tragedy. Perhaps a brewer in the next century may use an Owen Land film still. [watch McEwan’s advert on YouTube]