WELCOME > SCHEDULE > EXHIBITIONS > EVERYTHING COMES FULL CIRCLE

HEART OF HAWICK, ROOM 206
THURSDAY 2 – SUNDAY 5 MAY
10:00 – 17:00 / 14′

Content warning: contains flashing imagery.

FREE ENTRY

PROGRAMME NOTES
by Michael Pattison

In Everything Comes Full Circle, Lilan Yang examines the mechanics of memory, and the interplays between the everyday minutiae of human experience and the vast, planetary expanse of geography and time. Inspired by Wim Wenders’s Paris, Texas (1984), the work presents Yang’s own 16mm Bolex imagery of that movie’s filming locations, captured on Kodak colour negative film stock – scans of which were subsequently inkjet-printed onto transparent film, to which laser-cut perforations were applied, resulting in a projectable, splice-heavy film strip. Each loop of the projection melts the ink: an assertion, simultaneously, of Yang’s vision and the impermanence of their image.

Everything Comes Full Circle is Yang’s second project in direct dialogue with the Wenders film, following Cinepath, which used data visualisation to map the 1984 work’s fictional movements – between Los Angeles, CA and Houston, TX – to real-life locations on Google Maps. Providing a more on-the-ground cine-tourist’s lens to these locales, however, Everything Comes Full Circle is a work of deliberate distortion. Applying digital methods to fabricate analogue processes, the film makes a central conceit of the tensions between contingent, handheld image-making on the one hand and machine-led reproduction on the other. 

In this sense, Yang transcends mere homage, filtering the mapping exercise of their film-inspired road trip into a borderline pointillist tapestry of barely recognisable iconography. The effect of the distortion is uncanny: like memories, these blown-up, high-contrast scenes are somehow clearer when viewed from afar – as if proximity is merely an illusion. One can discern, in the heavily distressed textures of the image, gas stations, diners, neon-lit strip malls. 

While these are the kinds of locations that structure long journeys, a process of passing-through, other phenomena tether one’s memory to them: the mirror-effect of headlights on wet tarmac, the fleetingness of driving past a roadside inn, the mechanised interventions of wipers on a windscreen – reminders that the image is filtered. Served by a gently fluctuating soundtrack by composer Julian Tran, Yang’s work reaches for – and captures – the poetic, sequential qualities of the road movie, whereby the experiences one accrues, of disparate landscapes across time, are refracted into the hard-to-pinpoint meanings of a single journey.