Graham Ellard and Stephen Johnstone

Mark Dean does not have the monopoly on using recycled classic film footage as the raw material for video works. Graham Ellard and Stephen Johnstone have created an equilibrium-knocking, eyeball-zapping beast of a video in their 1999 work, Wall of Death. This is an installation with a vengeance, where the viewer walks into the inside of a large open-topped cylinder which simulates the inside of a fairground wall of death set-up. But, once inside, instead of being orbited by twitchy high-torque, low-revving Indian drag-bikes centrifugally stuck to the walls, the viewer is surrounded by a screen around which a video projection from two rotating cameras shows high-speed car chases between a selection of American coupés and roadsters. These are grabbed from a selection of Hollywood classics such as Bullitt. Here, however, we witness a wild-goose chase, as cars from different movies chase each other without the remotest chance of catching or being caught. Watching this spectacle is an enervating experience, as visually exhausting as the real thing would be mentally exhausting.