landscape still lifes

Above: still from 'My Job is for my people', HD Video, 22 minutes

 

‘If there are no more dustbins of history, this is because History itself has become a dustbin. It has become its own dustbin, just as the planet itself is becoming its own dustbin.’ - Jean Baudrillard

Through the process of Globalisation in the 1990s, we now have access to this ‘dustbin of histories’. How do we investigate and explore this?  

 

Visiting a place can reveal it’s history and also the current reality of a place and it’s people. There are ideological power relations between the past and present and power struggles between the past built environment (such as monuments and installations) and the current attitudes towards them.

 

Narratives are continually played out within the historical power relations of a society. Within these, there are tensions such as the construction and deconstruction of cultural identity. It is these places and tensions with the past that interest me. In making site visits, I come across objects where identity has clearly manifested itself. But whose identity is it?  

 

My sculptural and film works seek to explore this condition of loss and disappearance, where the past built environments become ‘sites of memory’. By accessing found texts and researching local archives, pastiche re-creations of places and scenes are re-created in film. They have a Kuleshov effect that makes distinct contrasts between the items that have been pulled directly from the landfills of history.


Website:
 www.alanrutherford.co.uk

Email: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. 

Instagram: @alanrfineart

 

still life and book

Above: still from 'My Job is for my people', HD Video,  22 minutes