Watkins video and sound piece at The Film Archive

Clinton Watkins: Avalanche
Essay by Matthew Crookes
The Film Archive
10 December 2009 - 27 February 2010

Clinton Watkins is known for his memerising and subtle video and sound work. My favourites are his slow moving, brightly coloured, container ships that slowly creep across the screen and a swinging lamp shade projected on a roof.

This work, seen next door to ARTSPACE, features a loop of found film of an avalanche. We see it barrelling horizontally across the face of a mountain like a delicate small wave approaching a beach, only to change direction when the mountain suddenly gets steeper. Then the motion becomes vertical, cacophonous and churning. Its mood alters from that of a rippling crest to that of something enraged, thunderously chaotic and swirling - and filling the whole wall.

At first 'loop' the only sound is a continuous rumble but gradually Watkins adds an electronic aural backdrop that gradually becomes more dominant. Spatially the ominous, grinding roar and ‘lyrical’ electronics seem distinct and separate, clearly defined and not interchangeable or blending.

The image is so hypnotic with its spectacularly terrifying but beautiful violence that added sound doesn’t seem necessary. Its cascading falling motion and billowing clouds of thrown up snow are so riveting that even with no sound at all you wouldn't take your eyes off the projection wall. The mountain is transformed from a massive solid object specked with tiny fir trees to something liquid and flowing like the sea. Movement here becomes oddly abstract, while gravity seems to be approaching its most pure state – even simpler than falling rain - but thankfully so much rarer.

Moving and disintegrating images

7:5 (seven films by five artists)
Two Rooms
19 August - 9 September 2009

This group show (now over) downstairs at Two Rooms featured short films - sometimes loops - by Clinton Watkins, Gregory Bennett, Judy Darragh, Dorota Mytych and Alex Monteith.

Monteith had the advantage of having the video room out the back all to herself, showing a work previously seen at St. Paul St of different Moto-X riders making tracks up and down a huge dune at Ahipara - as if it were a massive sheet of finely grained drawing paper. With Monteith the whining crackling staccato of the engines was a big component of the pleasure (and humour) she provided, along with three quarter angle photography that could almost be aerial.

Gregory Bennett’s animated films often seem to illustrate some futuristic theme where solitary individuals no longer exist, humans being only capable of moving in unison - like ants that share a common mind. His recent work is now more concerned with simple geometry than it was previously when it was more narrative-based. Densely packed rings of humanoids move their limbs and torsos in co-ordinated unison, opening and closing, like an awakening bud. Bennett is really a choreographer of digital dance, a designer of beautiful (but simple) communal actions.

Clinton Watkins’ slow moving loops of a galloping horse and swinging light shade hypnotically caressed your retinas, while teasing you into searching for the minute jump where each cycle restarted. The gentle pulse from the rocking light, and the flickering space between flailing equine limbs and distant background, held your interest - keeping you from leaving.

Judy Darragh’s video of 365 daily ‘Rorschach tests’ of symmetrically patterned, coloured ink drawings, were a little like Julia Morison’s erotic ink folds (seen in the second most recent Auckland Triennial) but less vaginal and more like butterflies. They had a horizontal, not vertical, format, and were made after giving birth to a child. Darragh’s metaphor of a butterfly thus seemed appropriate. The light of these delicately transparent drawings became particularly intense when enlarged and converted to video, causing the chromatic saturation of the ink to seem to fade. It was a clever idea to put them in a slowly morphing sequence.

The theme of metamorphosis was also apparent in Polish artist Dorota Mytych’s spectacular videos of images made of tea leaves. These, after a stationary period, then became scattered as if blown by a large fan. Though an obvious reference to the transience of existence, her fleeting portraits and figures also alluded to the fortunes of the planet, grim augurs for our species’ future.

Glidetime

Clinton Watkins
Two Rooms
14 August – 13 September 2008

Clinton Watkins is one of those artists whose interest in one methodology has fine-tuned him for another. He is a very fine video-maker with the sensibility of a painter.

Of the two videos here, one is a ten minute shot of the sea: watching the changes on the horizon brought about by rolling fog (like circular brushmarks smeared so the structural contours are blurred); the other is a much shorter loop of a container ship crossing the screen. Its moving image is divided horizontally, so it looks like an Elsworth Kelly, early Brice Marden or Don Driver’s seventies Relief Series of projecting panels.

Not only is this last work like a minimalist painting, but it is also like the unfolding of a poem, the way the blocklike letters on the bow gradually reveal their sequence within the vessel’s name. The gliding horizontal drift is mesmerizing - like a puck moving in slo/mo across an air hockey table - as is the soothing electronic music Watkins makes to accompany his images.

The simple ideas that he uses are very effective meditations on the nature of passing time and the appeal of watching motion. Watkins has made a number of ‘ship videos’, each one with its own mood, the result of the boat shape, colour, boat name, and weather conditions. It’s wonderful work, full of action that is incredibly calming and nuanced. A visual and aural treat.