Jamie Jenkinson

Evelyn Yard is pleased to present a new body of work from critically acclaimed British artist, Jamie Jenkinson. Add New Layer, Re-present, Progressive Scan brings together a series of works which examine Jenkinson’s ongoing investigation into the field of expanded cinema, digital phenomena and cinematic cognition.

Arnie Space Race takes a genre created by the spectacular image of an actor, layering every movie he stars in, available on VHS, into one composite video. The onslaught of sound and image produces the essence of ‘Arnie’ into a sensory overload. The viewer is forced to ignore narrative and representation, and to start seeing the image as a whole, resulting in a more engaged mode of viewing.

Cinema, and Glass/Light III, both works from 2014, present, for the first time, two painterly works, which investigate the way in which one looks at the distortion of the image in cinema, video and online, both perceptually and cognitively.

Alongside these works, a new group of sculptural interventions and objects will explore the physical manifestations of digital limitations, alongside consumerist production of the video image. Here, synergies between optical and the digital processes allow the viewer to perceive objects that one encounters in everyday life with new light.

Nicky Hamlyn on Fan on Fan, 2014

‘Jamie Jenkinson’s Fan on Fan consists of a projected video image of the rotating blades of a white electric fan, projected through the rotating blades of the same actual fan. The action of the fan blades breaks up the projector’s beam into its constituent colours, which fire in a three-colour cycle at such a speed that we normally perceive them as their composite, i.e. white light. The fan blade’s moving-image counterpart, the shutter, is an essential component of the technology for shooting and projecting films, which depend on the discontinuous presentation of multiple images to sustain an illusory movement. Here the shutter, the invisible sine qua non of the technology, becomes both subject and structuring device. The fan forms the work’s subject in the image, while the actual fan’s presence threatens to destabilize that same image, partly through obscuring its projected counterpart and by breaking the light down into coloured bands. The work is circular (sic), in that an aspect of its own technology becomes its subject matter, which is then recycled via a projection system that disrupts it even as it appears to figure or reveal its functioning. The balance of elements favours the material presence of the video projector and the fan, with the modified image a tentative, albeit necessary presence, whose main function is to refer the viewer back to the precariously sustained conditions of its existence. Fan on Fan reminds us that light becomes unruly when subjected to ordering processes.’

Nicky Hamlyn is Professor of Experimental Film and Senior Lecturer in Fine Art Media at the University for the Creative Arts, Canterbury, Kent, UK, and Lecturer in Visual Communication, Royal College of Art, London. His book Film Art Phenomena (2003), is published by the British Film Institute. And he is currently co-editing, with A.L.Rees, a collection of essays on the Austrian film-maker Kurt Kren, to be published by Intellect Books in 2014.

Jamie Jenkinson is a London based artist working with video, sculpture, installation and text. He studied at UCA, Maidstone in Video Arts Production BA, followed by RCA, London in Visual Communication MA. He produces a monthly online exhibition of artist video through XVIIX.com, lectures and holds workshops up to postgraduate level. He works with artist groups including collective-iz and KU. A recent graduate of London’s Royal College of Art, Jenkinson has exhibited extensively since 2010 with recent shows including amongst others: Abstract Currents, MoMA, New York, USA; Acoustic Images, BFI, London, UK; MK Gallery, Milton Keynes, UK; A Contemporary Expression, National Portrait Gallery, London, UK, and The Future of the Poster, V&A, London, UK (all 2013).