A is for afterimage
A is for Afterimage by Anne Colvin
In collaboration with Federation Gallery and NEoN Digital Arts. Supported by Creative Scotland.
Set within the Keiller in Dundee–a 1970’s brutalist shopping centre–a series of elemental interventions explore the space as temporal site. In between the underused spaces, you find a newsstand, phone, homeware, and clothes shops, a ‘storeroom’ space, a Keiller Centre “open” sign and the tannoy system are now activated in new and exciting ways. Providing the backdrop for Colvin’s recent moving image, sound, painting, and poetry installations.
Colvin describes her practice as an eco-feminist journey across space and time. She sees herself as a conduit or portal, working inside and outside of the ‘frame’, where time can be abandoned and held, where narrative is non-linear and where one element can contain another. A re-ordering of experience, the swaying in and out, the pacing and looking. An archeology of the mind and of the times.
Installed within the Home Kitchen shop, Dear Prudence re-imagined (2021) a single-channel video, brings to life Colvin’s poem, Dear Prudence – in collaboration with TiDžany Boyle, Louise McVey, Nichola Scrutton, Katie Shannon, and Bumi Thomas – as a filmic experience. Ephemeral moments or fragments of lived experience explore and build the relationship between materiality, voice, thought and memory. The air exists as an archive of sounds and secrets. Also supported by Creative Scotland.
In Cosmic Drop (2022) a single channel video installed in the Star Mobiles phone shop, Colvin sculpts moments, basketball to choreography to painting. Minute shifts in vantage occur, slowing down and magnifying urgent gestures. Set in the Edinburgh Sculpture Workshop and Hawthornvale outdoor basketball court, the body exists as site, the screen as an extension of self.
Garments for Alchemists (2022-2023), life-size newsprint cut-outs with gouache, pearls, fabric, photo and pencil – originally commissioned for Cindy Rehm’s Dreamhouse, part of the 50th celebration of Judy Chicago’s Womanhouse in Los Angeles – hang in A1 portfolio sleeves on the clothing fixtures in the Style-n-Fashion clothes shop window.
A collection of loose-leaf poetry sheets, Scattered skylights in a room with a view resisting placement from somewhere to nowhere (2020-2023) reproduced on soft grey, A5 cotton paper can be found on the Summerton Newsagent news stand. A selection from the past three years speak to place, silence, lockdown and colour.
Storeroom Redux (2023) housed in the Federation Gallery space serves as the project ‘base’. Carpets, rugs and fabrics sourced from the Keiller charity shop are displayed on walls and floors. Vintage vitrines from the Keiller storeroom are configured within the space and contain paintings, editioned poetry boxes, and other project ephemera.
The tannoy system will be activated at noon every day with fragments of sound from Electric Earth a moving image work-in-progress; a series of sound eDžects including a ’ship ambience’ and ‘space-ship siren’ blur the lines between fact and fiction. Colvin’s Installation for a quiet mind poem transforms the free-standing Keiller Centre “Open” sign into a moment for contemplation as it moves around the centre throughout the course of the project.
About the Artist
Anne Colvin works across moving image, painting and poetry. Most recent solo and group exhibitions include Shifting Terrains, MCA Museum, Oakland, CA (2022); Dream House part of Woman House, Anat Egbi, LA; LAND, LA (2022); Chain Reaction X111, SF Art Commission Gallery (2020); When does a second become a moment: Anne Colvin, Patricia Fleming (Projects), Glasgow (2019/20). Recent group shows include Here was Elsewhere: >>FFWD, Cooper Gallery, Dundee (2018); Gallery Tally/Starless in Midnight, BALTIC, Gateshead (2018) and FFWD: Moving Image from Scotland, Minsheng Art Museum, Shanghai, China (2017).
Her work has also been exhibited in venues such as SFMOMA, SF; MASS MoCA, Mass; Torrance Art Museum, CA; Berkeley Art Museum, CA; Gavin Brown’s Enterprise, NYC; Spencer Brownstone Gallery, NYC; Jancar Gallery, LA; Modern Edinburgh Film School; GoMA, Glasgow and Skelf, London among others.
- 5 – 30 June 2023
- Keiller Centre, Dundee
- Tuesday – Friday 10-4 pm, Saturday 12-4 pm
