After the Paint has Dried

‘Rohesia Hamilton Metcalfe’s After the Paint has Dried is a mesmerising film of richly tactile black-and-white images in constant states of transition. The attempt to grasp and name these elusive points of transition is one of the primary subjects of the film. We hear a male voice-over telling a story of meeting a woman at a party. She gives him her phone number. He calls. At the same moment he admits to himself that he doesn’t want to deal with rejection. An answering service picks up. In a panic, he decides to leave a message for Ernest Borgnine; only to find that it is in fact, Ernest Borgnine’s service. The story trails off…
There is a double edge to After the Paint has Dried. Though it is successful at sustaining an undulating, and at times even poetic tone, equally it is a work that demands constant assimilation of highly intuitive properties. At the same moment one allows oneself to be taken in or to enjoy the passive pleasure of its soft voice, it taps into our fragmented and abstracted recollections to ask us for a set of revised perceptions. There is a wide shot of an older woman walking to the corner in the rain, holding an umbrella. There is a sense we’re watching her from the window, and a sense that we’ve seen her outside of our own windows. These images seem to have a heartbeat; a collective unconscious.’ – Sharon Greytak, Signs of Fiction exhibition.