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Catherine Yass. Films
Her first production, Descent, was filmed in one of the European centres of economic power: the Canary Wharf in London. With a camera installed in the service lift of a skyscraper under construction, she creates a vertical and phantasmagorical X-ray of unfinished architecture. Her second film, Flight, was commissioned by the BBC. A miniature helicopter circled above the British TV corporation's headquarters. The artist has the following to say about this project: “I was interested in the desire to fly and the inherent impossibility of doing so”.
Before using a 16 mm film format, the artist worked with photography, creating a unique style based on positive and negative colour processing, creating extraordinary images shown in light boxes. Her first work with moving images was in video, and later developed into film. Álvaro Rodríguez Fominaya Biography Exhibited works: 1 – 13 March 15 – 27 March |
This exhibition examines one of the most recent and less studied aspects of Catherine Yass: the production of works of art on film. Since 2002 she has produced three films, all of which will be successively on show in the Centro Atlántico de Arte Moderno: Descent (2002), Flight (2002) and Wall (2005). The artist’s work related to moving images is based on the notion of film-installation developed in the 90’s. An initial interpretation of these projects leads to an analysis of architecture in contemporary society.
Her latest film, Wall, is concerned with the tension between aesthetic and political experience. In 2004, she filmed the wall separating Israel and Palestine, deciding to film it from the Israeli side and focusing the camera on the physical wall and its breeze blocks. For an entire year, she filmed sections of the wall in Baqa, Qalqilya and Jerusalem. Catherine Yass explains that “this is my personal reaction to the wall,...and the way in which the political embargo has materialised”. The three films refer to kinetics and vertigo, each of them investigates a different type of movement, and they all study recent architectures, either under transformation or agonizing.