WELCOME > SCHEDULE > EXHIBITIONS > OSCILLATING SPORADICALLY

HERITAGE HUB
THURSDAY 2 – SUNDAY 5 MAY
10:00 – 17:00 / 6′ (looped)

Content warning: contains flashing imagery and strong language.

FREE ENTRY 

PROGRAMME NOTES
by Milo Clenshaw

Gabby Follett and Hogan Seidel return to Alchemy Film and Moving Image Festival – each in-person for the first time – with Oscillating Sporadically, a jointly made two-channel work that stretches and contracts space, with the voices of both artists orbiting and colliding with one another across its duration. 

The work presents two side-by-side digital scans of hand-painted 35mm film, which the artists passed between them each month for a year during lockdown. The images, which are sometimes impossibly rich with colour and at others a starkly contrasting black and white – have been paired with voice-notes the artists recorded for one another. The images themselves appear for an unpredictable duration, refusing to be pinned down and privileged over any other moment. 

There is a sense of the artists’ closeness despite the indirect and technology-bound stiltedness of their notes. These are busy people living separate lives, and yet within the porous dialogue they have created there is a sanctuary of space and time outside of life’s forward march. At times, the pair seem to miss one another (‘I will watch this when I get home.’ / ‘I miss you too.’); at others, their phrasing or topic of conversation suddenly sync – creating a bittersweet display of simultaneous proximity and remoteness. The overall effect is one of a tide: crashing in with sound and colour before ebbing back to moments of greyscale quietude. 

Oscillating Sporadically is a wholly collaborative work. The voice messages often contain reflections on the work itself at various stages of its production, revealing the sense that the artists’ shared practice, like their relationship, is ongoing – the film functioning as a continuation rather than a culmination. There is a vulnerability in these in-between moments, reflected in the intricate joys and bedazzlingly sculpted messiness of the painted reels. 

Moments of gentle humour punctuate Seidel and Follett’s generous invitation into the textured landscape of their friendship. It is this generosity – its patience, its openness, its love – that provides the continuum in which the film’s wider themes can take hold; prompting a consideration of alternative spaces within a world that leaves less and less time for care and catching up, for conversations without a distinct purpose or end.