Rachel Cattle & Steve Richards Same Old Scene 7 Sep - 7 Oct 2007 Private View - Thursday 6 September 6-9pm Rachel Cattle and Steve Richards both live and work in London and have collaborated on projects together over the past five years. They make animated drawings, short films and comics/fanzines inspired by horror films, folklore, ladybird books and music. Last year their Cardboard Films were shown in Paperworld at Transition Gallery, London. They also exhibited at Publish and be Damned in London and recently at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago. Rachel had a recent solo show of her drawings at The Centre For Recent Drawing. For Same Old Scene at Transition, they are showing a film and an accompanying comic book. Using hand drawn cardboard sets, the film takes as its starting point a collection of pivotal moments and distilled elements recollected from Hollywood romantic films, Westerns and popular music which together conjure an abstract world of possible starting points and alternate storylines.
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Reviews Rant Flavorpill Time Out |
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Notes from a conversation with Rachel Cattle and Steve Richards SR ...it's those kind of heightened emotions...dramatic emotions and heroic notions of romance, I suppose...and about how, at different times, we remember things slightly differently...and when you discuss it, they all merge into one scene that wasn't actually there... RC ...especially when you remember film...like the ballroom scene in 'Last Tango in Paris''...the poignant bit at the end in the ballroom...and in my head they were on their own and it was pitch black, just the two of them...but when we looked at it again, that scene is crowded with people and furniture...we each pick out the bits that are important to us and edit out the rest... SR ...because memory isn't fixed...it's like things that you sketch down...like a drawing...where being able to see the pencil marks heightens the emotion... because it personalises it...more than if you were seeing actual clips of film...it emphasises the idea of a reconstruction of a fleeting memory...it's taking those things and generalising them almost to abstraction... RC ...you're looking back on a series of events but you get side-tracked to all sorts of other things...and you go backwards and forwards...you know that there's a beginning and an end but you're jumping around within the two...so they become less of a narrative and more of a mood...they can be very clichéd moments...but they're also very beautiful moments...romantic notions of escape... SR ...that can transcend their over-familiarity and are kind of made strange to some extent through memory. .............................................................. SR When you think about how music is made it's interesting how over-production can... RC fuck stuff up... SR ...because it loses emotional intensity and I've always liked things where mistakes are left in and where you can see or hear the processes that are going on within it...like Elvis's early Sun recordings where it was very instant...it was rehearsed but changes were made on the hoof and if something came out accidentally, they could go in that direction....the production process was intentional to emphasise that...it was about the joy of making it... .............................................................. RC When you take things from different genres, different times, different films and different music, cheesy things, things that are modern and things that are old and music that's dramatic and classical and pop and collage them together in a way that makes sense...it's like the way we live our life culturally having a plastic rose in the corner of the room and watching a French arthouse film...it's the combination of those different elements that makes a greater meaning... SR ...they might jar but you realise that they have some effect on each other that you may not otherwise have seen...and maybe there are patterns there...that are always there and perhaps are set...an eternal recurrence...that repeats...
(Interview by Helen Sumpter)
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