Cornerhouse Gallery Host Stef Elrick reviews Rough Cut…
The Chinese box is as intrinsic to storytelling as the bunny-in-a-hat trick is to magic. It’s a narrative device that provides legacy, bestowing fictitious personalities with factual histories. It facilitates a panoramic perspective in a work – it’s literary magic. Epitomised in the gothic masterpiece Dracula, the countless dusty tomes penned by H.P. Lovecraft and even in Quentin Tarantino’s blood thirsty Pulp Fiction it invites collective authorship and stirs up an ambiguity of source, most potent in mystery and horror.
Jamie Shovlin is an artist purposefully placing such pervasive portals in the palpable world of art. His work archives projects and people that have never existed, but lead prolific and fascinating lives nonetheless. Posters, pictures, battered shoes bearing band logos or time worn cassette tapes become evidential breadcrumbs in tangled trails of unreality as he lines pathways with cultural relics that question how we create, communicate and document experience. The creative climax is to observe an audience following these trails only to realise they are lost in an intangible terrain. Charles Saatchi was allegedly duped by such a façade, buying the sketchbooks of a fictional 13 year old Jewish girl Naomi V Jelish, an anagram of the artist’s name.
Shovlin and collaborators undermine reality by painstakingly producing proof of things that never were including the extensive career of German punk band ‘LustFaust.’ The band’s back catalogue lacks nothing but a real album (and actual members). Anagrams, homages and hidden clues litter the work that swells with each project in a web of pseudo-artefacts – mutually supportive and totally tongue-in-cheek.
From the back catalogue of ‘LustFaust’ came the seed of Shovlin’s newest project, the scoring of a low budget 70’s horror Hiker Meat (another anagram of his collaborator and writer Mike Harte). This spawned the making of a remaking of a film that never was. It began as a 300 word blurb intended to replicate the low standards, cheap thrills and stereotypes of the exploitation genre. It became the central crux of a feature-length visual collage culled from online sources documenting the deconstruction of cinema itself.
“The idea is that these films are so standardised viewers are familiar with them as archetypes. We’re mining a well-trodden visual standard meaning we can tell part of the story and have the viewer’s fill in the rest” explains Shovlin.
The close study of intentionally bad taste classics fuelled the aesthetics and production methods of Rough Cut, essentially a meta-mentary authenticating the remaking of an imagined film from 1981 by director Jesus Rinzoli. Re-shooting key scenes from classics such as The Evil Dead, Psycho, Nightmare on Elm Street, Torso and nods to Lair of The White Worm. Rough Cut unveils the trickery at work behind cinematic slash-and-gore shockers exposing just how formulaic these movies are and more importantly, how much we project meaning through memory onto familiar structures.
From the spontaneous human angle we see the actual cast of Rough Cut shooting Hiker Meat in the Lakes (a poor man’s California) getting devoured by mutant midges that are seemingly more deadly than the snaggle-toothed beastie lurking in the caves, a hilarious parallel. We see a petite Polish woman being squeezed in the belly of a lubed-up creature whilst fumbled pyrotechnic boobs leave everyone on edge and a miniature of the Bates Hotel surviving intact. A camera man frolics merrily through the tall grass in an attempt to capture a butterfly, mirroring the juvenile naivety of the on-screen teenagers at ‘Camp Pharos’ in a tender comedy of real life. He also triggers a domino sequence of camera effects opening the aforementioned Chinese box of celluloid sorcery and a Wickerman parade is the unprompted response to a week of fatigue, physical exertion and a testament to artistic stamina (aka insanity). The spontaneous creativity of the cast is infinitely more interesting than the spoof of the spectacle and this is where the heart of the work really begins to open up. The personalities of the artists and technicians behind the sounds, the effects and the characters speak louder that the simulated drama ever could. The stories within stories within stories and collaboration of those involved make the seemingly mundane the most marvellous thing to watch.
Rough Cut premieres at Cornerhouse on Fri 29 Nov. Watch the trailer and book your tickets here. Our up and coming exhibition Hiker Meat will showcase all the props and paraphernalia from the film and will run from Jan 18 – Apr 21 in our galleries. Rough Cut is a Cornerhouse Artist Film.