 Above The Macbeth 70 Hoxton Street London N1 |
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Richard Couzins 26 April - 20 May 2001
2001, video stills For Hoxton Distillery, Richard Couzins exhibited a new body of work developing his concerns with language. These six new videos condensed stationary and sculptural elements into a flow of ephemeral utterance. Couzins brings together an assortment of displaced objects that, when combined, are filled with urgency and unstated danger. Familiar objects collide with everyday conversation, highlighting the curious nature of relationships between objects. Bringing these juxtapositions into a gallery space invites us to pay attention the strangeness of quotidian events. On a large scale video projection the works Hand (30 seconds), Wall (1 minute), Park (2 minutes) and Plates (2.5 minutes) were shown beside a monitor displaying Nose (1.5 minutes) and Easel (2 minutes). Richard Couzins' work is influenced by live art and collage, and by practitioners that include The Wooster Group, Rose English, William Wegman and Mike Kelley. Exploiting links between sound and image, Couzins utilises video to inhabit spaces that sit "in-between" different media and modes of representation. He describes this uncertain location as a place "where things are forged, where there is an abundance of energy, process and spontaneity". The work is full of parody, irony and tensions, veering between overstatement and understatement, with a heady overdose of metaphor, humour and unsettled feelings. Language and language systems are at the heart of Richard Couzins' practice. Referencing vernacular and colloquial speech, the language of objects, and archaic forms of communication (such as music hall songs) his work actively engages with the medium of video: for example this can be seen in his use of repeated edits which emphasise the artificiality of this familiar medium of video. Richard Couzins studied at Duncan Jordanstone College of Art in Dundee, and has been working as an artist in London for the last ten years showing both nationally and internationally in group exhibitions (including London, Copenhagen and New York). In 1997 he showed work in the solo exhibition Not That Thrilled, A Thriller at the Tram Depot Gallery, London. Extract from "In works such as Mountains and We Lost the Thimble and Hunted Other Ornaments, a wealth of information immediately hits the viewer. In a matter of a few minutes, a variety of visual material - ranging from sliding pebbles and drums to a horse rider and a miniature Eiffel Tower - intermingles and blend in rapid sequences of still and moving images. And, unlike the tradition of narrative film-making, no storyline or overarching narrative framework will here allow the viewer to work out a sense of order in what may very well at first seem like an erratic display of unconnected pictures and sounds. Hence, not the absence but the very excess of information is what arrests and calls into question the process of signification in these pieces of work, typically leaving the viewer in a state of confusion and bewilderment. Couzins' videos not only explore the audio-visual possibilities of their selected material, they also push the medium to its limits, calling into question its proclaimed virtues and pleasures." |
