Celluloid revisited

Film and photography often cross over into art, and vice versa, with many artists keen to explore the boundaries between the media. It’s a theme that runs through the forthcoming Alan Cristea Gallery exhibition Young Contemporaries 2009. It showcases a quartet of hand-picked artists, who all take film and photography as inspiration and source material for elaborate works on paper. Kate Atkin, an MA graduate in Photography from the Royal College of Art, describes her large-scale, intricate pencil drawings as slow-paced ‘re-enactments’ of what is shown in a photograph. Marie Harnett’s work literally blurs the lines between art, photography and film, in highly detailed, minuscule drawings derived from film stills. Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day, Marie Antoinette and Brideshead Revisited all feature, as she captures dramatic, erotic or melancholic moments in time. Federico Fellini’s 8½, a classic about the film-making process, forms the basis for some of Eilidh Young’s work—a series of photopolymer prints based on the film. Complex collages from Nathalie Guinamard, who is interested in ‘using a medium associated with editing and erasing for creation’, are both playful and uncanny and have a dark, surreal quality. According to Alan Cristea, the exhibition indicates that art and film ‘inform each other more and more, and that technology has become increasingly important for artists’.

Young Contemporaries 2009 is at the the Alan Cristea Gallery, 31 and 34 Cork Street, London W1, from 28 January to 28 February