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PHILIP ROSE

(UN) STILLS was a series of 52 short (1 min. or under) videos. A new video was posted on my website every Saturday during 2017.  All the videos, to one degree or another, have an affinity to still photos.  The series title is a little clunky, but feels right for a project that sits somewhat awkwardly between still and moving imagery.  The videos are single continuous shots (no edits) from fixed camera positions (no zooms, pans, tilts, etc.).  Many were culled from miscellaneous personal footage shot over a number of years, mostly for projects that never came to fruition.  Some, and in particular the first piece, are minimalist and sober.  Others 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 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 went – 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).  When I ran out of recuperated material from the ‘archive’ I’ll shot more ‘scenes’ each week, shaped by the accumulating series. I applied a kind of ‘Slow Food’ approach to this project.

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