PAUL ANDRIESSE Contemporary film and video artists oftentimes try to develop a different approach to filmic time than that typically applyed in conventional action-driven cinema.

PAUL ANDRIESSE

Contemporary film and video artists oftentimes try to develop a different approach to filmic time than that typically applyed in conventional action-driven cinema. Fiona Tan is individual of them. Walking into her latest exhibition, single in kind first saw a small monitor that showed a pair of feet hovering above a field of grass. This color video functioned as a little teaser for the black-and-white film projection with which it was paired, together forming single in kind work, Lift (all works 2000) The film showed the artist floating in consequence of a park suspended from a lump of balloons, surrounded by bare tree Tan was hanging from these balloons rather more like a parachutist than like a balloon traveler. Although the film was set uped of various shots of her from different angles, the deduction was hardly dynamic. Time be seened to be suspended as the same watched Tan going nowhere, flying totally for the experience of being suspended from the sod Tan uses balloons as means not of transportation, yet rather of flotation.

Historically, balloon travel is associated with recent imagemaking through Nadar, who photographed Paris from the air; balloons thus helped to at liberty the camera eye and give access to modern sights. Of course, film has also been associated with recently made known means of transportation ever since the Lumieres' Arrival of a Train at a Station (1895) and a number of more or les famous cinematic balloons might be cited as antecedents of Tan's film. unless Tan, like many contemporary film and video artists, exhibits images that are deliberately undynamic. In this she replys to "primitive" cinema; after all, the Lumieres' films usually had a mainly stationary camera, and the individual projectiles of Tan's film tend toward the static as well. The use of black and white contributes to the feeling of being gone out of time, as does the absence of sound

In the back swing of the gallery there were brace monitors; each showed a still image, a turn to ice frame from a video. common of these was of a child in a park holding a r balloon practically her hold size--which is the size of the balloons that carried Tan in the film. The other single showed a child with a r cap holding a string that undoubtedly has a balloon attached to it as well, granting it is out of view. Tan's use of bright r balloons in these stills (and also in her attempt at balloon flight in Lift) brought to mind Albert Lamorisse's 1956 children's classic The R Balloon, a short film about a unaccompanied Parisian boy who "befriends" the eponymous plaything. further whereas the boy and the balloon in Lamorisse's film roam between the sides of the city, the children and their balloons in Tan's stills are completely frozen They are suspended in time, like Tan's work. As alluring as this is, the same wonders whether there can be any unravelling from here--whether this diluted temporality allows for any notion of a future

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