The body of work in this section often ponders and creates, performs and transforms 'cinema '- with or without directly grounding the work made in the literal materials of film. This work represents a body work within Anne-Marie's wider practice that collectively that explores 'cinema by other means', often using materials and the techniques different from those commonly associated with the cinematographic apparatus to produce 'cinema' in the widest sense.
The work pictured is from an event The Big Screen, for Norwegian artist Kjetil Berge's exhibition 'The Weather is Fine in Russia', at Sigfried Contemporary London. Artist Lucy Gunning and Anne-Marie performed the opening event to The Big Screen, referencing the image of the old Metro Goldwyn Mayer's roaring lion, used to open countless films. Anne-Marie 'performed' Gunning's visceral roar. Berge: "The roar now becomes a distinctly female roar for the world".
Tue, 9 January 2018, 6:30pm- 8:30pm.
The Producerers Present: A Table Reading - in two parts
https://griffingallery.co.uk/events/the-producerers-present
On January 9 Griffin Gallery is delighted to host inaugrual performances by The Producerers. The performances will start at 7pm.
The Producerers is a collaborative venture featuring artists, Anne-Marie Creamer and Zoë Mendelson, with invited guests. Utilising the interval between exhibitions at Griffin Gallery as a partial set, The Producerers will stage the first in a series of public events.
The Producerers will actively ponder and create, performing and transforming painting, cinema and theatre - without necessarily directly grounding the work made in the literal materials of each medium. We aim to affect a re-contextualisation of relationships between painting, stage and screen as concurrent, sometimes profound. The borrow and the bleed between media will be subjected to active scrutiny via practice.
Aside from their work with The Producerers, Creamer and Mendelson’s own practices are multi-disciplinary, connecting with drawing, with technologies, with seated and roving audiences and with duration and temporality. In Creamer’s case this manifests via an interest in narrative, representation and presence; in Mendelson’s case via an interest in cultural, spectacularised interpretations of disorder.
For the event at Griffin Gallery The Producerers are interested in making work which foregrounds props, sets, production and preparation of works for stage and screen, using the rehearsal as a point of contact between painting and cinema, painting and theatre. We will stage a theatricalised table-reading - often the first dramatised reading of a future drama for stage - using this form to re-imagine theatre and performance played out through the forms of exhibition and lecture.
Using her recent exhibition, A Diagram of Waiting, at Griffin Gallery’s Perimeter Space, engaging lighting, sound and image, Anne-Marie Creamer will perform a new work, The Waiting Room. Using her experience of rehearsal with Italian actress Simona Senzacqua to develop a fantastical outline of the doubling of presence that can occur when an actor materializes into a fictional character.
Zoë Mendelson’s performance lecture, animation and accompanying objects suggest the cultural construction of disorder - as collagist. A live work emerges, which reflects on the borders of psychopathological attachments to ‘stuff’; psychologies inherent to accumulation; and conscious and unconscious spaces occupied by both object and analysis.
Image (above): Zoë Mendelson, The Panels of Colette A, performed at ‘Spectacular Evidence’, 24 March 2017, Toynbee Hall, London.
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Anne-Marie Creamer works with cinematic and theatrical forms using digital film, fiction, animation, drawing, written films, filmed staged scenarios, and live voice-over. For Anne-Marie narrative is complexly entangled in place - always underpinned by her interest in the relationship between representation and presence. Her work develops from a tenacious attitude towards research, which coupled with chance, she develops into highly scripted narratives featuring occluded histories that are melancholic but wry, corporeal, often intense. Anne-Marie's work will feature in a forthcoming solo exhibition at the new Foyle Space, Sir John Soane's Museum, London, in 2018. Exhibitions featuring her work include; FRAC Bretagne, France, Exeter Phoenix Galley, Sogn og Fjordane Kunstmuseum Norway, Kunstvereniging Diepenheim, Netherlands. Publications include The Drawing Book, edited by Tania Kovats (Black Dog Publishing, 2006), and The Lost Diagrams of Walter Benjamin, edited by Sharon Kivland and Helen Clarke, (published by MA BIBLIOTHÈQUE and Anagram Books). Anne-Marie works at Central Saint Martins College of Art, University of the Arts London, where she works in the Fine Art department. http://amcreamer.net
Zoë Mendelson is an artist and writer with a collagist practice, using collation as a methodological framework for creating networks between psychoanalytic theory, psychotherapeutic practice, spatial theory, fine art and critical practice. Her work includes various forms of writing (fiction and non-fiction), collage, drawing, performance, animation and installation. Zoë’s research engages disorder as a culturally produced phenomenon, in parallel to its clinical counterpart, suggesting its value to knowledge production within Fine Art and critical theory. Zoë has exhibited widely showing works, performing and publishing, nationally and internationally - largely in public spaces (from Fondation Cartier, Paris to Chapter, Cardiff). Her work is also installed permanently (visibly and covertly) in public buildings, such as at Town Hall Hotel, London. Zoë is Pathway Leader for BA Fine Art, Painting at Wimbledon College of Arts, University of the Arts London. She co-curates the network paintingresearch with Geraint Evans. www.zoemendelson.co.uk
"I do not see myself as I look at you (animation)", in the exhibition, ARMEL BEAUFILS : LE REGARD DES FEMMES, Galerie du presbytère, Saint-Briac sur Mer, Frac Bretagne, 1 July to 3 September. July 1st - September 17 2017. (photographer, Hervé Beurel)
This image, together with a sculpture by early 20th century artist Armel Beaufils, was exhibited in a group exhibition at FRAC Bretagne, France, curated by Sharon Kivland, ARMEL BEAUFILS : LE REGARD DES FEMMES. This exhibition frames an invitation to 40 female artists to respond to the work of early 20th-century sculptor Armel Beautfils, who was known for his observed study of the female form. Each artist was asked to make a two-dimensional image in response (indeed, correspondence) with a work, often a plaster model by the sculptor. Anne-Marie was presented with the work, Jeune Femme penchée vers l’avant, bras pendant, and made this image and text work, which she suggested was an animation, of sorts.
The text says:
I do not see myself as I look at you.
At this moment you are of me while I look, and later you will be of me when I remember you.
Your quizzical look addresses someone just over my shoulder; what I see when I look at you is self-consciousness, held in his quiet scrutiny and discretion.
I now secretly animate you!
Turn! Lift up your shy chin!
Slowly, surely uncurl your spine.
Take one step forward. Stop!
And stare back.
First now at me.
Now at him, standing behind me.
Now, to my surprise, you raise your arms, forcefully reaching out as you look at us forever.
Tue, 9 January 2018, 6:30pm- 8:30pm.
The Producerers Present: A Table Reading - in two parts, The Waiting Room
This image, (photographer, Hervé Beurel) togehter with a sculpture by early 20th century artist Armel Beaufils, was exhibited in a group exhibition at FRAC Bretagne, France, curated by Sharon Kivland, ARMEL BEAUFILS : LE REGARD DES FEMMES, Galerie du presbytère, Saint-Briac sur Mer 1 July to 3 September. July 1st - September 17 2017.
This exhibition ARMEL BEAUFILS : LE REGARD DES FEMMES frames an invitation to 40 female artists to respond to the work of early 20th-century sculptor Armel Beautfils, who was known for his observed study of the female form. Each artist was asked to make a two-dimensional image in response (indeed, correspondence) with a work, often a plaster model by the sculptor. Anne-Marie was presented with the work, Jeune Femme penchée vers l’avant, bras pendant, and made this image and text work, which she suggested was an animation, of sorts.
The text says:
I do not see myself as I look at you.
At this moment you are of me while I look, and later you will be of me when I remember you.
Your quizzical look addresses someone just over my shoulder; what I see when I look at you is self-consciousness, held in his quiet scrutiny and discretion.
I now secretly animate you!
Turn! Lift up your shy chin!
Slowly, surely uncurl your spine.
Take one step forward. Stop!
And stare back.
First now at me.
Now at him, standing behind me.
Now, to my surprise, you raise your arms, forcefully reaching out as you look at us forever.
Tue, 9 January 2018, 6:30pm- 8:30pm.
The Producerers Present: A Table Reading - in two parts, The Waiting Room
https://griffingallery.co.uk/events/the-producerers-present
Anne-Marie Creamer & artist Zoe Mendelson, during The Producerers, wheeling on a prop
Tue, 9 January 2018, 6:30pm- 8:30pm.
The Producerers Present: A Table Reading - in two parts, The Waiting Room
The image was from By Way of an Introduction, a performative lecture about Anne-Marie's work that uses moving image, sound effects, and a series of inter-locking narratives that experiment with time to present a selection of her work to an invited audience at Curators Vacation, a mini summit of curators from Norway and Scandinavia that took place on the island of Hersvik, Solund Islands, western Norway in July 2016.
A Diagram of Waiting uses differing mediums and approaches to depicting the rehearsal of the actress Simona Senzaqua, as she rehearsed her part in one of Anne-Marie films, Treatment for Six Characters
Here Anne-Marie placed created a lit tableau taken from a still from one of her own films, Treatment for Six Characters, ehearsal from
Duration: 6 minutes 52 seconds. Please note in an exhibition context this video is a loop.
High definition video
48 khz stereo sound
2011
'Meeting the Pied Piper in Brasov, a paper prologue" (2011) uses fifty-four new drawings by Creamer to tell the tale of her journey to the Romanian city of Brasov in 2005, where by chance she encountered a group of dancing Skzekely children in the town square. This encounter led to her earlier film ‘Meeting the Pied Piper in Brasov’ (2006). There is no film footage or photographs of this journey or the moments leading up-to this encounter. Instead, with reference to silent movies, Creamer has told this tale by her black and white drawings which have become the film she can no longer make. As well as narrative images she had also painted the film’s opening and closing title sequences, film directions to fade up or down, and a wipe transition between two of the film’s sequences. Creamer reveals the un-made film as a single female hand opens a black box and lifts out one drawing at a time: a sort of anti-animation each movement is also the next frame of the absent film. The moving female hand constantly throws resonant shadows across the drawings while the rhythm between each drawing is precisely timed with an accompanying soundtrack that references 1920’s films. “Meeting the Pied Piper in Brasov, a paper prologue" is a way to tell a story using a form of paper cinema that alludes to silent film: cinema without film in the traditional sense. It is a story-within-a-story, a mis-en-abyme, referencing both Creamer’s own earlier film as well as the German legend ‘Die Kinder zu Hameln’ by Die Brüder Grimm.
Anne-Marie and Tania get the train from Budapest to Transylvania. They change trains at Brasov and while they wait they drink a coffee in the town square during which they encounter a group of dancing Skzekely children. Tania tells Anne-marie this is the very same square where the Pied Piper was said to have brought the children of Hamelin 730 years ago, after they were said to have disappeared into a void in a cave in Poppenburg just outside Hamelin in Germany. They continue their travels deeper into Transylvania. Anne-Marie decides to search for the cave in the Mereisti mountain gorge which is said to be the exact spot, with a similar void, where the Hamelin children entered Romania. As she does so she thinks about a street in Hamelin called Bungeloss, or soundless street, which to this day in homage to the 130 lost children of the town all conversation and music playing must fall silent if people should find them-selves walking there.
Exhibition History: Anne-Marie premiered ''Meeting the Pied Piper in Brasov, a paper prologue" at the Diepenheim Kunstvereniging, Holland, in the Diepenheim Drawing Centre in October 14th 2011. The exhibition features Hans de Wit, Een Keuze, Peter Morrens, Anne-Marie Creamer, Jochem van der Spek, Hans Op de Beeck, and Ben Kruisdijk. The exhibition has been curated by Arno Kramer and feature current forms of important experimental approaches to drawing.
EMERGENCY6, Aspex Arts, Uk, 2013: It was also exhibited in EMERGENCY6 , together with its sister work 'Meeting the Pied Piper in Brasov', aspex arts, Portsmouth, UK, where Anne-Marie won the Peoples Art Prize for the work.
A Diagram of Waiting uses differing mediums and approaches to depicting the rehearsal of the actress Simona Senzaqua, as she rehearsed her part in one of Anne-Marie films, Treatment for Six Characters
Here Anne-Marie has developed a mini play here echoing the layout of a page from a screen-play or play which has been turned into a window based vinyl work. It is based on a fictionalised version of her rehearsals with Italian actoress Simona Senszaqua, which focuses on the transition of an actor into a fictional character.
Still from By Way of an Introduction, performative lecture, July 2016
Still from By Way of an Introduction, performative lecture, July 2016
Image above, 'Fictional Introduction' for 'Treatment for Six Characters':
As part of Flac Group's three month art-takeover of venue The Exhibit, London, 20 artists were challenged to respond to the local area with artworks that "react, build up or deteriorate" over the three month period between January - March 2016. On February 14th Anne-Marie presented "Fictional Introduction", as well as a screening of Treatment for Six Characters. "Fictional Introduction" re-works an introduction Anne-Marie gave ahead of 'Treatment' at The Drawing Room Gallery/ The Tannery London, but here the introduction has been turned into a script, in this first version enacted by British performance artist Jordan McKenzie. McKenzie presented himself as being Anne-Marie, reciting her words about the evolution of the work. The event is intended as a meta-prologue to her film and drawing on both her own and Luigi Pirandello's ideas seeks to heighten the line between author-actor-character.
Anne-Marie is currently developing a further iterations of this work with a team of actors - a 'swarm of Anne-Marie's' - all competitively, absurdly insisting they are the author of Treatment for Six Characters.
There is also an booklet featuring the script for 'Fictional Introduction', which currently exists in versions for one, six or ten voices.
Diagram of Waiting uses differing mediums and approaches to depicting the rehearsal of the actress Simona Senzaqua, as she rehearsed her part in one of Anne-Marie films, Treatment for Six Characters
Here Anne-Marie placed stills from rehearsals into a wooden structure intended to echo the theatre stage, a repeated motif in Anne-Marie 's work.
Text based drawing, acrylic on paper.
84.1 X 59.4 cm
2016
This is text based drawing is based on an extract from Italian playwright Luigi Pirandello's 1936 prose text Treatment for Six Characters. The text depicts the scene of the final moment Pirandello's Author completes his creative work, Treatment for Six Characters, the same work Anne-Marie has based her film of the same name on.
The drawing also serves as a connecting work and an 'establishing shot' for the staging of related works Treatment for Six Characters and Fictional Introduction.
"Fictional Introduction" booklet containing the script for the work. There are several versions written for between 1 - 10 voices.
limited edition booklet
edition of 50, + 2 AP
24 page colour booklet
2016
"Fictional Introduction" booklet containing the script for the work. There are several versions written for between 1 - 10 voices.
limited edition booklet
edition of 50, + 2 AP
24 page colour booklet
2016
"Fictional Introduction" booklet containing the script for the work. There are several versions written for between 1 - 10 voices.
limited edition booklet
edition of 50, + 2 AP
24 page colour booklet
2016
screenplay for 'The Passing of the Keepers of Salento', which is another version of the film as a text based work. This is Page 1
This version of the video work, The Passing of the Keepers of Salento, for the Moving Landscape project commissioned by Projeto GAP in Italy 2014-15, also appeared in the book of the same name. This attachment for the book featured a text based version of the film. As well as including the dialogue spoken in the film it include reference to all the sound effects ad action - claiming then to be another version of the film in text based form and part of Anne-Marie's on-going exploration of 'cinema by other means'.
screenplay for 'The Passing of the Keepers of Salento', which is another version of the film as a text based work. This is Page 4
A still play. A film in another form, told by 50 still images.
Images & text by Anne-Marie Creamer
Digital C print.
11.69 x 16.53 inches
2011
This is a paper version of the work, 'Meeting the Pied Piper in Brasov, a paper prologue'.
Sequel version 1: The Tragedy of a Character
Live Voice-Over, projected image, and sound effects & music
Duration: 10 minutes.
2014
“The Tragedy of a Character” forms a sequel in the afterlife of a fictionalised self-aware, character Anne-Marie previously developed for the project “Kom til deg i Tidende” (2012) - the character being “the oldest man in Sogn og Fjordane”, a region in western Norway. Creamer creates a new work that develops the cinematic capacities of writing to describe her enigmatic encounter with the old man who makes a forlorn but angry return to a peninsula in Norway in order to meet with her. Creamer uses this as a way to extend her use of form and her interpretation of cinema: various elements of this new ‘film’ are held apart and are instead extended into the physical space of a gallery, performed live in front of an audience. Specifically, the human voice is simultaneously a performed event as well as precisely timed, out of frame Voice-Over tightly synchronized to edited footage together with an atmospheric use of sound effects and music. The work makes use of spectacle and storytelling, making strategic use of Anne-Marie’s presence in the film as well as the physical presence of the audience. “The Tragedy of a Character” forms part of an on-going exploration of alternative ways to create cinema without film in the traditional sense. In these terms ‘Cinema’ also becomes an range of artistic strategies, involving drawing, the moving image, cinematic writing, sound, music, as well as objects and props.
There is also a version of this work made for camera, (Sequel 2: TOMIS), The Tragedy of a Character, live voice over
For information please look at Anne-Marie’s related work, Kom til deg i Tidende.
(image: Anne-Marie performing a live voice-over for 'Sequel version 1: The Tragedy of a Character, live voice-over' at the Five Years gallery in 2014).
Sequel version 1: The Tragedy of a Character, live voice-over, script extract.
Text written by Anne-Marie Creamer, 2014.
A still play. A film in another form, told by one still image.
Image & text by Anne-Marie Creamer
Digital C print.
1996, remade 2015
A still play. A film in another form, told by 50 still images.
Images & text by Anne-Marie Creamer
11.69 x 16.53 inches
Digital C print.
2006
This is a paper version of the work, 'The Prompter of Krumlov'.