Extension looks to the power of representation within the moving image. Focusing on the trope of the woman in the red dress, the two-channel video installation invites viewers to consider the way we actively/passively consume images. Found footage is used to contemplate the Hollywood archive and its fixed modes of representation. The women in red band together, marching in one looped video; equally as powerful and powerless in their predetermined fate. Beyond the barrier of their screen, Kate Bush, adorned in her red dress from her Wuthering Heights film clip, extends an invitation of a new order. Both the image of Kate’s body and the film body are unbound through choreography, replacing predictability and fixity with image(s) in flux. Offering a slippage in visual indoctrination, the viewer is invited to discard notions of the body within the psychoanalytic paradigm and instead surrender to the powers of affection.
Image: Tess Landells, 2018, Extension (red), two-channel video and audio installation, film still. Original score by Andy O’Connor