Stilled Images

Stilled Images presents seventeen artists working across film, photography, painting, drawing, and sculpture, whose works come together to investigate and interrogate the boundary between still and moving image.

The scene that disturbed him with its violence, the significance of which he would only understand much later…

These are the first words spoken by the narrator of Chris Marker’s La Jetée (1962). If Marker’s film begins here, on the runway at Paris Orly airport, it proceeds almost entirely as a sequence of still images, and as a moving story told via a procession of freeze-frames and language. Marker’s film also begins as a kind of question, the answer to which we can “only understand much later.” If this question is the mystery of a man shot on a runway, and of a boy watching his older self being murdered on the same tarmac, then that “much later” is resolved neatly over the film’s twenty-eight minutes.

Yet, there is something in those opening words, particularly in the syntax and cadence of the original French, that might trouble us: the idea of a kind of “violence” inherent, not in a scene that is violent, but in one that disturbs or agitates.

There is a friction here between the scene as static tableau, as still image, and the movement or excitement that violence and agitation imply. This does not feel like the dry, schematic philosophy of Deleuze’s “equidistant instants selected… to create an impression of continuity,” but rather the implication of movement within stillness, the implicit violence of movement, and of time, that has been stilled, resounding as both seductive frisson and radical question.

Here, in Heather Phillipson’s early video work, Rebus (2011), the form of La Jetée is explicitly recalled in a film pieced together from predominantly still images, but with a voiceover and text that depart from Marker’s solemnity to offer an absurd, comic, and strangely tender statement of romantic disintegration.

In Graham Martin’s APBP (00:02:41) and APBP (00:12:32), such subversive tenderness is present in paintings that replicate the materiality of the moving-image medium (VHS) via meticulously delicate rendering of a degraded analogue image, imbuing the painted images with an overwhelming sense of living, breathing, and thrusting corporeality.

Elsewhere, in Sophie Ruigrok’s How to get what you want (2023) and Nana Wolke’s 00:01:16,012 → 00:02:27,023 (2023), the act of painting or drawing occurs directly within the dynamic, semantically enigmatic space that the film still produces. In Ruigrok’s work, four stills—from Le bonheur (1965), The Wizard of Oz (1939), Alice (1988), and The Truman Show (1998)—serve as the starting point for a series of drawings that offer a staggered inquisition of the spaces between, and the entanglement of, desire, freedom, and contentment.

In Aaron Ratajczyk’s, Garrett Pruter’s, and Miriam Naeh’s work, the same material becomes simultaneously cinematic, lyric, or documentary film, and photographic image, offering self-reflexivity that attenuates the materialities with which they work and amplifies the extraordinary human attentiveness their work displays and demands of the viewer.

Such reflexivity is present in Anna Barham’s Light Swathes Crossing (2020), where the foundations of the moving image—the childlike magic of still moments played fast enough to convince the brain of dynamic time—are subverted to produce a work in which moment and movement occur simultaneously, creating a transcendent experience and a stage for the tender agitation of Barham’s text.

Across all these works, a single thread is discernible: the innovative deployment of the negative space between still and moving image as a site of intense productivity, challenging artistic thinking, and profound questioning.