Dirty landscapes

11 April 2012
The Weekender

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Inspired by the optical effects of LA's polluted atmosphere, Chemical Sundown is a looped, 12 minute-long digital animation displayed, in its manifestation at Dot, as a video projection.

The piece veers from abstraction to figuration, but throughout conjures a sense of distortion that waxes and wanes. When the distortion is weak, you can make out the form of a city scene that stretches out before you, but on its strengthening you are robbed of your surety and plunged once again into a world of abstracted colour and form.

It begins with a vague and unstable horizon that stretches across a field of colour. Semi-circular shapes appear in pairs. The forms gently blur, lose their shape and their hues flow into strips that undulate in a slow and steady rhythm until they fade, and before you appear grids of brightly coloured rectangles, a spectrum of urban lights, set against a deep blue background. But the fidelity of the rectangles fails too, all the colours streak and bleed into each other until they become one flat field and the semi-circular forms emerge once again.

The accompanying ambient soundtrack builds the trippy, hallucinogenic feeling of journeying through a warped vision. The sense of unreality culminates in an unexpected moment when a fragment of film footage suddenly appears. It's a clip from Casino Royale of a beautifully dressed woman dancing on a bed in a pink room as feathers float about her - a reminder of the solipsistic lives that are played out beneath the hazy atmosphere.

In calling the work a "time-based painting", Blake goes some way to describing a medium that is somewhere between traditional video art and traditional painting and he exploits this artistic no-man's land to the full, creating an impressionistic journey through what are ultimately dirty landscapes of the mind.

Chemical Sundown by Jeremy Blake is open at Dot, 41/45 Beak Street, W1 every Monday-Friday from 1-6pm until 2 July.

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