Elizabeth Price

The two-screen video work uses archival imagery and digital animation to express the power dynamics at work within the organisation of knowledge in a library building

Part of the footnotes series accompanying Price's SLOW DANS, investigating the history of the word stiletto.

A fictional past, parallel present and imagined future as her video trilogy bleeds into another as longstanding inequalities topple; coal mines begin to speak again as academics commit to elective muteness, and oppressed female administrative staff subvert language and the stereotypical office tie.

London-based artist Elizabeth Price (UK, b. 1966) creates richly layered, moving image works made specifically for gallery settings. Composed of a broad range of imagery sourced from analogue and digital photography, animation, and motion graphics, her works are often accompanied by scrolling text, narrated by a computerized voice and paired with music.

Two-channel HD video with sound and color

FELT TIP is a science-fiction story that traces a social, sexual and technological history of the workplace. It is introduced by a female narrator, who is later joined by a chorus of three other computer-generated voices. They are the administrators of a large, unidentified institution. They tell of how they are required to store vast amounts of digital information within their own DNA, specifically in their fingertips, which have lost all sensation.

The fifteen-minute, two-screen digital video installation employs the museums’ photographic and graphic archives. It is a fiction, set to melody and percussion, which is narrated by a ‘chorus’ of museum administrators who are organising the records of Arthur Evans’s excavation of the Cretan city of Knossos. The administrators use Evans’s extraordinary documents and photographs to figuratively reconstruct the Knossos Labyrinth within the museum’s computer server. They then imagine its involuted space as a virtual chamber through which museum objects digitally flow, clatter and cascade.

The fifteen-minute, two-screen digital video installation employs the museums’ photographic and graphic archives. It is a fiction, set to melody and percussion, which is narrated by a ‘chorus’ of museum administrators who are organising the records of Arthur Evans’s excavation of the Cretan city of Knossos. The administrators use Evans’s extraordinary documents and photographs to figuratively reconstruct the Knossos Labyrinth within the museum’s computer server. They then imagine its involuted space as a virtual chamber through which museum objects digitally flow, clatter and cascade.

K builds on the ideas and research explored in
a previous work called SUNLIGHT (2013), which speeds chronologically through an historic archive of thousands of images of the sun taken
from 1875–1945. Photographed in high temperature 'K' light, the images are presented as a staccato animation, a feverishly ticking meter for a narrative told by a self-proclaimed ‘troupe of professional mourners.’ Price similarly revisits a series of photographs taken from hosiery packaging, featuring young women in highly expressive, stylized poses
of fear, dread or despair. They are pictured shielding their eyes; apparently from the camera and/or the sun. In K, these women become the film’s central protagonists.

K builds on the ideas and research explored in
a previous work called SUNLIGHT (2013), which speeds chronologically through an historic archive of thousands of images of the sun taken
from 1875–1945. Photographed in high temperature 'K' light, the images are presented as a staccato animation, a feverishly ticking meter for a narrative told by a self-proclaimed ‘troupe of professional mourners.’ Price similarly revisits a series of photographs taken from hosiery packaging, featuring young women in highly expressive, stylized poses
of fear, dread or despair. They are pictured shielding their eyes; apparently from the camera and/or the sun. In K, these women become the film’s central protagonists.

The two-screen video work, SUNLIGHT (2013) has been constructed using thousands of glass-plate slides of the Sun, created between 1875 and 1945, which Price discovered during her on-going residency at Rutherford Appleton Laboratory.

The two-screen video work, SUNLIGHT (2013) has been constructed using thousands of glass-plate slides of the Sun, created between 1875 and 1945, which Price discovered during her on-going residency at Rutherford Appleton Laboratory.

Concerned with processes of assembly, CHOIR brings together disparate bodies of material and archival technologies into dissonant concert. It is a work of several parts. Part one constructs an auditorium in which an action will be staged. Part two assembles the chorus to narrate the action. Part three supplies the action.

Concerned with processes of assembly, CHOIR brings together disparate bodies of material and archival technologies into dissonant concert. It is a work of several parts. Part one constructs an auditorium in which an action will be staged. Part two assembles the chorus to narrate the action. Part three supplies the action.

The Tent extrapolates an eventful fictional narrative from a black-&-white printed booklet and the body of art that it features in its pages. Presenting artworks with reduced economies, the book, a 1972 Arts Council publication entitled Systems, includes drawings, documentation of works, and photographs of the artists in the ‘British Systems group’, along with extended texts written by each of them. The video’s imagery is derived from recording both the object of the book and the images it contains. The videography employs experimental, high contrast exposures that will cause white pages to bleach away almost entirely, and black pages to intensify so that they become suggestive of spaces rather than surfaces; so that the diagrams/images on those pages seem to float in voids.

In December 2002 a ship called the Tricolor sank in dense fog along with a cargo of 2897 luxury cars. It went down in an area of the Channel between the British Isles and mainland Europe, called West Hinder. The video takes us to this location, to the dark hold of the wrecked vessel, to witness the spectral image of its luxury cargo drifting in the murk.

A film by Elizabeth Price

‘User Group Disco’ is set in the Hall of Sculptures, although only a series of mundane objects and utensils are visible, swirling in a black void. There is no evident architecture or human presence. Text flashes up on the screen which builds a narrative about these objects, the institution which holds them and the desire for consumerism. The work is accompanied by an immersive soundtrack developed especially for the video.

At the House of Mr X by Elizabeth Price takes as its subject the home of an anonymous art collector, designed and built in the late 1960s . Only briefly inhabited, the House and its contents remain immaculately preserved.

A film by Elizabeth Price