The Lighthouse: Louisa Martin
22 November – 20 December
Launch event: Friday 21 November, 7 – 9pm
Free & open to all
London based Louisa Martin’s The Lighthouse is a series of short videos whose themes and characters are interlinked, brought together to form a single work. The videos explore the absent or invisible body as a site of potential, exploring how the mechanisms of filmed performance enable the simultaneous construction and concealment of identity, and synthetic forms of intimacy.
The body double, the dancer, mimicry and lip-synching, costume and prosthetics all feature in order to explore the effects of living through digital selves on our subjective, internal sense of the sensual, material, bodily self – each video representing a psychological state.
The Lighthouse functions as an extended metaphor, or pataphor, for the internal space of the protagonist, and for the constructed space of video projection. The works are conceived as isolated and floating heterotopias for imaginary and impossible alternatives, in which the self only exists when performatively invoked.
The videos were shot over the course of one year in constructed sets with minimal crew and were choreographed in collaboration with dancer Kyrie Oda.
The exhibition is supported by Arts Council England. The first two videos in the series were commissioned by Whitstable Biennale.
Louisa Martin (b. 1983) is a visual artist working with live performance, video, sound and drawing. Recent exhibitions and performances include Whitstable Biennale, 2014; The Everything and Nothing Problem, Jerwood Space, 2013; Album2, Five Years ,2013; Of Course, Stour Valley Arts 2013; Artists in Residence Whitechapel Gallery, 2012; Veracity of Memory, Serpentine Gallery Project Space 2012.
Louisa’s short story As If (2013) was been published by Tate Modern as a metafictional resource for encountering the Tate Collection, and documents some of the initial thinking that led to The Lighthouse. Louisa is an Associate Artist with Stour Valley Arts.
Images by Jules Lister