Nature Morte - Installation version as part of the exhibition "Granular: The Material Properties of Noise"
James Hobbs · 2018
Nature Morte, (Installation Version) 16mm B & W film with optical sound (transferred to digital), monitors, speakers, amplifier, lighting, vases, and flowers, dimensions variable. Nature Morte is a suite of 16mm films composed of different floral arrangements, whereby the subject matter also transforms into a source of sound. Looking back towards Robert Mapplethorpe’s early flower photographs, Hobbs takes on board the ideas that the flowers represented here are simultaneously life and death – and as such have a frequency that hums with tension. With a focused and durational gaze, each “still life” explores the visual beauty of a staged composition, while at the same time searching for moments within the frame that utilize the optical soundtrack on the film’s surface to create sonic equivalents. The minutia of filmic marks is expelled as alien noises, and when combined together, form a chorus to supplement the images. Stacked TV monitors, hanging lights and perched vases with fresh flowers, act as a totemic shrine bringing the films’ subject into our own materiality. Within the films, beauty is preserved in a state of timeless perfection; outside of the films, the physical flowers’ organic matter is slowly disintegrating to a lullaby of optical noise. This work was exhibited in the exhibition Granular: The Material Properties of Noise, which explored granular noise as a condition of material transfer. The exhibition was accompanied by a published catalogue.