WELCOME > SCHEDULE > EXHIBITIONS > NUMBER SERIES

BORDERS TEXTILE TOWERHOUSE
THURSDAY 2 – SUNDAY 5 MAY
10:00 – 17:00 / 14′

FREE ENTRY

PROGRAMME NOTES
by Michael Pattison

Madison Brookshire returns to Hawick five years after performing Fountain, an expanded cinema piece for 16mm Pageant projector and harmonium, at Alchemy Film and Moving Image Festival 2019. With Number Series, the artist loops two 16mm reels, projecting both onto a single screen. The films themselves are inversions of one another: while one reel gradually shifts from a single colour to a different colour, the second projection presents the same shift in reverse. Presented here is ‘No. 2’, the second of eight entries in Brookshire’s ongoing series. What you are watching is one 16mm reel drifting from red to green, projected simultaneous to a 16mm reel drifting from green to red. 

The result is an apparent negation: while individually these projections would be experienced as an intense if ever-changing block of colour, when combined in this way they counteract one another, producing a continual off-white rectangle. The eyes deceive: while a term like ‘negation’ might go some way to pinpoint the effect at play, the ostensible absence of colour is in fact the sum of assertion – a negative actively and ongoingly worked at, as if the projections themselves are agentic forces locked in harmony by virtue of their opposition.

In this sense, Number Series is purely filmic in that its effects are the outcome of mechanics intrinsic to analogue projection. Because the colour of each image extends to the area of the film strip that the projector interprets as soundtrack, the unfolding visual tussle manifests, beneath the more immediate whir of the projectors themselves, as a quietly agitating white-noise. This never-not-there crackle lends a sense of movement to what might otherwise be described – wrongly – as stasis. 

Brookshire described his 2010 work Colour Series as an exploration of duration in which colour was the medium, the effect being an emphasis on how we experience a visual transition and, therefore, time. In Number Series, what we experience is a kind of persistence of vision: that of the projections, and of our own. Look long enough and you’ll become aware of your own perceptual assumptions. Here, seeing – if it is indeed seeing – becomes a searching, interpretive act.