GABRIEL LESTER
The Silent Trilogy
- The Blank Stare, 2013
- The Big One, 2011
- The Last Smoking Flight, 2008
Video
21.03- 04.05 2014
Gabriel Lester, the world-renowned artist, is for the first time, exhibiting his silent film trilogy. It consists of the following works: The Blank Stare, The Big One, and The Last Smoking Flight.
Gabriel Lester works impressively cross very diverse disciplines. This includes cinema, music, performance, installation, sculpture and architecture, with a strong theatric flare as a red thread tying his artistic oeuvre together. The artist is an innovator of the visual language. He speaks of his work in terms of «from a desire to tell stories and construct environments that support these stories or propose their own narrative interpretation.» Distinctly the driving force of the artist’s practice is an investigation of perception and observation. In general, one could say that Lester practice is cinematographic without essentially employing film or video, but posing a fragmented and atmospheric exploration of the powerful narrative media and its qualities. Then again, when the work is filmatic, Lester perfects techniques like editing, cutting, repositioning and perspective to create tension, suspense and drama. The viewer is offered minimalistic and atmospheric abstraction which allude ways to relate to the world and focus on the means and aspects that constitute our perception and understanding of it.
Parallel with his exhibition at 3.14, Gabriel Lester also exhibits in the 19th Biennale of Sydney (21 March–9 June, 2014).
Blank Stare - 2013
14' 43" - HD-video
The Blank Stare is the last film in the silent film trilogy in which explores the inward gaze (introspection, reflection, daydrea-ming and magical thinking). The film consists of a sequence of five rooms in which people, creatures and spirits are all connected by their gaze. Here arises an inward look, for the characters in the film, but also for the spectator of the film. In a seamless linkage the film moves from a scene of an everyday waiting room to an observation room in a mental institution, what could be the prayer room of a religious sect, a company of creatures in the future and, finally, to a space where infinity awaits.
The Blank Stare does not have any spoken dialogue, but is supported by a sound environment and a music composition by Job Chajes. The sets were designed and build by Gabriel Lester.
The Big One - 2011
17’ 24” – RED to HDV
The film depicts a grand spectacle, where a group of people partaking in the lottery rite, are observed as they proceed through the various stages of the ceremony and imagine destiny unfolding. The film depicts both man’s desire for change and a sense of (cosmic) justice, as well as the gaze inward, when the characters in the film seem to undergo an inner search, looking for what they could imagine would happen if they were to become the lucky winner. A lottery draw, a spectacle that follows the logic of narrative drama, without proposing a plot or characters.
The Last Smoking Flight - 2008
23’ 44” – RED to HDV (2008)
A triptych – clouds, airplane and smoke – the film depicts a group of passengers in a small airplane trapped in time and space; on the way from somewhere on the way to nowhere. The passengers are gazing both inwardly as well as outwardly, and seen wrapped up in thought, lost as much in their imagination as the airplane is in time and space. The film meditates on the ephemeral: the way life and ideas eventually pass and fade away. Simultaneously this work is both a tribute and a lament to a highly potent and versatile symbol of the 19th and 20th century.