This December, for the third year running, London’s Tintype have opened their Essex Road video installation, showing eight commissioned films in their street-facing window which all directly explore the local area. Here, five of the displayed artists discuss their work.
Susan Collins, Wild Life, 2016
I lived near the Essex Road for a few years in the late 1980’s and have always loved its very particular eclectic charms. It is unusual in that it has managed to retain its unique character nearly thirty years later, in the most part eschewing national chains for local treasures such as Get Stuffed [a taxidermy store].
It was a combination of wanting to celebrate Essex Road’s distinct shop life and encountering lots of squirrels wandering around my own neighbourhood (now Camden) that made me think about approaching the brief through the lens of local wildlife — animate and inanimate. It gave me something to explore Essex Road through. Once you start looking it is amazing what you find (although I never found a squirrel).
In constructing the film I was also thinking about the shopfront context, where it would be seen and by whom. It is constructed entirely from sequences of photographic stills, an animated postcard if you like, or love letter, to the Essex Road and the fauna who occupy it.
Lynne Marsh, Resurrection Restoration, 2016
I was struck by the beautiful facade of the former Carlton Cinema along Essex Road and was curious about its new function as a church. In my work, I’m often looking to capture architectures of spectacle, re-negotiating the locations and the events they frame. Here the secular space of worship – the picture palace — was being repurposed as a scared space — re-casting the building’s original iconography. I was interested in paralleling cinema’s suspension of disbelief with spiritual notions of faith. The film features the church choir during services and rehearsals intercut with the restoration work taking place at the same time.
John Walter, Dream Season Part 2, 2016
I had wanted to make a film for some time that drew on the noir of David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive. I also wanted to draw on the TV show Dallas, specifically, Season 9 in which Bobby Ewing appears in the shower, despite having died in the previous season – known as the dream season, hence my title. Essex Road becomes a site for a surreal adventure at night in which I can place my brightly dressed characters within the dinge of the city. New River Walk, which runs parallel to Essex Road helps suggest the parallel lives of the characters involved in my drama.
Joby Williamson, Second Glance, 2016
I intended to make a film that reflects the way I spend time observing the street and taking visual notes mentally as I walked around London. So this brief was an excellent opportunity to focus in on part of my practice that is not making a physical object or print, for example, but a way of looking and taking notice of my surroundings (a bit like Instagram thinking). Having spent lots of time prowling up and down Essex Road, and seeing the gallery occupy the site from its earliest incarnation, I’ve been interested in the shops that look out onto the road, giving staff in each a rich scenic view — the gallery has an amazing street viewing vista.
After an incident left the gallery window with a huge crack in the glass, I realised that it refracted light and movement of events in the street, becoming a device to witness and record the locale. I also used footage from the moment when the spoiled glass was replaced with a new pane, recording the process of physical labour and co-ordination that such an undertaking requires. My film ends with a shot of another local tradesman obscuring the window with his soap solution and wiping the glass clean as testimony to the street and its ever-evolving identity.
Andrea Luka Zimmerman, Lower Street- A Night Journey, 2016
Lower Street: A Night Journey is about life in the shadows, survival, the gentle in a gesture that could turn to danger in a beat, but also a critique of simplistic characterisation. Simone Weil said the biggest gift is that of attention, and Ella, the former (actual) stray, with whom we travel along the Essex Road, shows us the night creatures (human and otherwise) in unexpected ways. It is also a film about the paradox of the forbidden, and how what nurtures one may sacrifice another.
‘Essex Road III‘ shows daily, from 4pm-midnight until 14 January at Tintype, London
