SBC Gallery of Contemporary Art, in association with LUX, presents The Short Form, a selection of short films drawn from the LUX archive compiled by the artists Sarah Pierce and Gerard Byrne.

 

The Short Form

 

Using simple search criteria of LUX’s film and video archive (sorting according to duration: 1 minute, 2 minutes, 3 minutes, etc.), the Dublin-based artists Sarah Pierce and Gerard Byrne chose an elemental, structural way of sifting through the inventory and of selecting films rather than sorting according to key words or themes, era, artists or genre.

 

The resultant program, The Short Form, presented at SBC Gallery of Contemporary Art, escapes the curatorial ‘thesis’ approach that typically bonds artworks, in order to think of the works as singular, detached, and irreconcilable.

 

But interestingly, when the archive itself is the material, something happens and seemingly stand-alone works, placed side by side, begin to form meanings not wholly in our control. This is both the resistance and the generosity of the works themselves. They simultaneously give way to one another, while remaining impervious to any overarching synthesising principle bestowed upon them. 

 

The intrinsic eclecticism of the selected works in The Short Form, assertively compiled in a dense cluster, emphasises artistic tendencies which appear to be both central to the practice of artists’ videos, yet increasingly unfashionable within the dominant curatorial tendency of showing longer films that mimic the “shorts” and “features” of filmmaking.

 

The Short Form program is 60 minutes long and will be projected in the gallery on the hour every hour beginning at 11am, Tuesday through Saturday. The last daily screening begins at 4pm.

 

Sarah Pierce and Gerard Byrne are artists based in Dublin. This exhibition is presented as part of SBC’s Focus Program ÁGUA VIVA. 

 

SBC wishes to thank VOX, centre de l’image contemporaine.