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PHILIP ROSE

(UN) STILLS is intended as a series of 52 short (1 min. or under) videos.  I’ll post a new video every Saturday during 2017.  All the videos, to one degree or another, will have an affinity to still photos.  The series title is a little clunky, but feels right for a project that will sit somewhat awkwardly between still and moving imagery.  The videos will be single continuous shots (no edits) from (mainly) fixed camera positions (no zooms, pans, tilts, etc.).  Most of the first videos will be culled from miscellaneous personal footage shot over a number of years, most for projects that never came to fruition.  Some, and in particular the first piece, are minimalist and sober.  Others will have more dynamic movement throughout the frame, but all have something of a hypnotic feel to them.  The idea for this series came about in part through my increased activity on Instagram and this material could have resided there but I’ve decided to give it a more structured and independent identity by stretching it out over the year on my website as a kind of exercise in ‘exploded video’ – serializing fragments of what might be thought of as one video over an extended period and shaping it as I go – thinking about a kind of non-associative montage where previous images, separated by a greater than usual interval, may only be vaguely recalled but still resonate through the next shots.  (Or each short piece might just exist in its own peaceful isolation).  I’ll see how the weekly rhythm works – not going head-to-head with Hockey Night in Canada, but a kind of attempt to carve out a (brief) collective moment to check something out on a regularly occurring basis (and manageable in our overheated image lives).  When I run out of recuperated material from the ‘archive’ I’ll start shooting more ‘scenes’, shaped by the accumulating series.  I'm applying a kind of ‘Slow Food’ approach to this project.  Glad to share it.  Hope you get something out of it.

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