This is an interesting show, and, furthermore, an interesting concept for a series of contemporary works. Emma Hart is an artist working in what I suppose could be called performance-based media arts: She makes films, installations, performances and exhibits photography. As she describes it herself, to her "practice is a course of action". For this, her first solo show at Cell Project Space, she displaces the action unto her object: Her camera.
In three video works, Hart's camera becomes the protagonist. In LOST, the camera supplants Hart as she searches for her watch. In Car Crash, a series of photographic still lives, the camera is involved in a reciprocal conversation with a subject on the topic of car crashes and in Dice the camera performs for the audience, its willing spectators. A voice-over narrative sets the stakes in a game between the sea and a die.
Conceptually this is an area of work that pops up every twenty or thirty years, when an artist or group of artists approach the lens from an angle detached from mainstream trends. Sometimes it sticks (see the example of the very first avant-garde filmmakers, such as Maya Deren and Man Ray, whose tropes are still copied [sorry, paid homage] and referenced today), or perhaps the ongoing video-based investigations of artists including Vito Acconci or Nam June Paik.
Unlike these artists however, video is a very unpopular form of mainstream visual artistic practice, strengthened only by the industry shift toward digital video in creation. Still, the very term 'film' implies a moving image, particularly an exhibited or presented moving image. It is heartening to see an artist like Emma Hart presenting a show like this.
JAM by Emma Hart is at Cell Project Space until 22 April.
