t.s Beall in collaboration with Mary Bellamy: Untitled Horses
Castlefield Gallery
Manchester, UK
1 Dec 2006 – 28 Jan 2007

Review by Rea Cris

American Glasgow based artist t.s Beall, in collaboration with Mary Bellamy, has created a site-specific work at Castlefield Gallery where an aptly chosen brown stallion and white mare wandered around the gallery while fixed cameras recorded whatever came into their field of vision. The artwork, pertinently titled “Untitled Horses,” is then shown in the same gallery in the form of a video installation with accompanying audio composed by Bellamy (minus the horses and the manure they left behind). The Castlefield Gallery is a strangely shaped gallery, occupying the corner space of a building with sharp irregular angles. It roughly covers two small floors, with numerous different landings, stairs and steps in between. Adding to this architectural bizarreness, half of the bottom floor is oppressed by a low ceiling. There is a lack of attention to detail in the exhibition as a whole, which diminishes the work. The majority of the work is on the bottom floor with wall sized projections on opposite sides of the gallery. At one end two projections are overlapped, which is clumsy and distracting. There is also too much light coming into this end of the gallery to fully appreciate the projections.

The idea, though, is fantastic. The whole concept of the piece brings into doubt the belief in film or video as being an all-seeing and all-knowing medium. We are made more aware of the distortion of reality inherent in visual mediums than we wish to admit. Untitled Horses reminds me of live television, where we ‘technically’ realize the events are live but the precise fact that it is on a screen removes the sense of ‘real time’ completely. Alternatively, I don’t get this feeling when listening to the radio. The video installation acts as a live witness to the events, displaying what happened within the walls of the gallery in the recent past, yet, at the same time, it is make believe. Standing in the slightly claustrophobic gallery, you can’t imagine how two adult horses would fit. You’re surrounded by documentation of an event that actually happened but is still has the sense of fabrication to it. It doesn’t help that the audio was manipulated or euphemistically ‘composed’ by Bellamy. The video or film footage that is meant to be the indisputable bearer of truth is turned in its head, we suspect it of exaggerating, telling lies, manipulating the truth to make it more spectacular. One projection presents the horses as a whole; the opposite projection is a focused spot, showing close-ups of the horses’ muscular legs or stomachs, breathing heavily. Yet which view is correct or real?

The exhibition continues on the upper level with a large black and white documentary photography of the mare nuzzling the equipment, which ruins the mysterious atmosphere of the exhibition. The photograph looks clownish, like this whole exhibit and installation was one big laugh. The best part of the show is an extremely small monitor showing the horses filmed on a 78mm camera to the right of this photograph. The film continuously skips like an old educational projection reel in primary school. The horses pace about; we catch glimpses of swishing tails and the stallion’s penis. The film gives an eerie feeling as if the fate of these horses is doomed. Once the camera is switched off, these horses will be killed and skinned, but that might just be down to the rust coloured film stock. But the effect of this morbid video and endearing photograph juxtaposition next to each other adds to the general clumsiness of the exhibition.

www.castlefieldgallery.co.uk

press release