Contact I & II at New Arts Projects, London

Contact mixed film and video with objects in which movement was implied or virtual, prompting a reflection on what ‘moving’ might mean in this context, given that ‘moving image’ is a problematically oxymoronic term, and apparent movement illusionary. All the work demands imaginative thinking on the part of the viewer to extend and complete it.

Jenny Baine’s Method over Matter (2024) is one of a series in which repetitive bodily actions involving strenuous balancing acts or the holding of difficult positions are presented as 16mm black and white film loops. Baines’ feet protrude from below into the frame in an urban setting. We’re invited to guess what’s happening below the screen: is she doing a handstand or simply propping up her legs while resting her back on the ground? This work encourages speculation on off-screen space and proposes a meta-critique: off-screen space in narrative films is necessarily a continuation of what’s in-frame to what’s outside it, whereas here we can’t be sure. Repeated actions are presented as loops, generating affinities, but important differences, between the actions and their form of presentation. This in turn poses the question of what precisely is the match or fit between a looping action and the film loop presenting it? The work is projected onto a screen stretched within a custom black metal frame, fabricated by Baines and based on her bodily proportions, thereby suggesting another affinity: the screen supports the frame as the artist’s body supports her legs.

Cathy Rogers works with implied or latent movement in her lightbox series, including Miscanthus (2024), composed of a photogram of a plant made on rectangular arrangements of 16mm negative. In seeing these composite images on adjacent strips of film we can  see the image as a single thing and we can  try to imagine how it might look if joined together and projected as a succession of fragments, a process facilitated by the position of the sprocket holes in relation to the image. Thus, imaginative speculation is calibrated by this physical juxtaposition.

Baines’ work links to that of Carali McCall and Sophie Clements, both of whom also work with grueling forms of performance. McCall’s Circle Drawing 1h 55 minutes, from an ongoing series (2012-24) involves a repetitive, live drawing process that continues until she is exhausted. The drawing is a residue of the action, and in looking at it we can try imaginatively to retrace that action. Doing so involves thinking through what retracing minutely involves: how do we disentangle the overlapping loops? McCall raises questions around intentionality: what are the consequences for work that’s made by a body at the point of collapse?

Sophie Clements’ Come to Ground (Battles) (2023) was made during a winter residency in Newfoundland. Three videos, shown on a stack of monitors, show her literally battling the elements. In crepuscular light, wearing a head torch, she wrestles with a large board or a mass of netting, or she shovels snow into blustery headwinds. The work constitutes an immersion into these harsh conditions, where impossibility and futility are turned to creative advantage, art as pointless struggle, as it should be.

Contact II shifted the focus from performance and filmed movement to pseudo or virtual motion and stasis. Savinder Bual and Elena Blanco’s elegant A Different Lens (2024) consists of a water-filled glass tube placed on a sheet of steel mesh suspended horizontally in a frame. The diffractions caused by the light passing through the glass tube are animated by the viewer as they walk around the work, putting them into a similarly productive relationship to its materials as McCall and Clements are in their relationship with graphite, netting, snow and wind. The viewer draws, performs even, the work, by making the mesh move, palpably connecting lines of sight with matter. The apparent movement bears comparison with that of film, in that it is generated not by the work but in the act of perception.

Andrew Vallance’s Never Still (2025) is the most static work in the show, yet its title addresses the question of movement, which is invariably implied in photographs to some extent. A set of different-sized lightboxes contain negative transparencies, so that the viewer is invited to imagine what the positive versions look like. A particularly vexing challenge is offered, in which perceptual-cognitive limits are confronted; anecdotally, film laboratory technicians mastered the art of ‘reading’ negatives (a by now largely obsolete skill), but for the ordinary punter this is a much harder thing to do.

Two site-conditioned works completed part II. In Simon Payne’s Floor Piece (2025) a video projector points down at the floor in the large opening between the two front rooms of the gallery. Monochrome-colored shapes drop into frame one by one, overlapping each other to create secondary color mixes. The work plays on flatness and depth, on the shapes as material things and as colored light. The floor is both screen and modified surface, image bearer and illuminator. Floor Piece is designed to work in ordinary lighting conditions and as such has a rare predecessor, Michael Snow’s 34 Films (2006), which was made on 16mm film using similar techniques, but projected horizontally. By projecting vertically, Payne engages ideas around gravity and its indirect representation via the ‘falling’ shapes.

Jim Hobbs’ Jim Hobbs’ Polytechneiou – When the Order breaks the Fractures Lull, (2024) converts a grid of ceramic tiles into a pulsating video by relaying the analogue image via a chain of cameras and monitors to a final monitor in the front room. The tiles reference the pixels from which their image is formed. The pulsation is a consequence of the noise in the signal and the circuitry, the air through which the light travels, its reflections and refractions on its way to the final monitor. It connects back to Bual’s visual disturbances, although here the movement is entirely system-generated. These last two examples demonstrate how these various works constitute an interrogation and expansion of how we understand the term ‘moving images’, and what they can be.