LEIGHTON PIERCE
50 feet of String
Video (51 minutes, color, mono sound, 16mm presented as digital file), 1995.
Curated by Malin Barth.
13. January - 19. March 2017. 13.01.
3,14 is very proud to be featuring experimentalist filmmaker Leighton Pierce with his award-winning feature film 50 feet of String.
50 feet of String, is a work reframing familiar pace. Pierce composes a film united by 12 movements, all with subtle repeated pulses of daily life. The work consists of carefully constructed shots composed from Pierce´s immediate surroundings, in and outside his home. Time and rhythm engages the viewer´s imagination, expanding and filling in what can´t be seen but implied.
Leighton Pierce explores experience in time through his film and video work, with the aim to induce the viewers to linger. He is committed to causing small, but acknowledged changes to a viewer’s sense of time, perception and memory. His use of image and sound creates a sense of balance between the known, the comprehensible and predictable as opposed to the unknown, the abstract and unexpected. The cutting of grass, a passing bus, rain on the window, and the use of a child’s red plastic spade loops around. Then the reappearance of the string, running diagonally and subtly across the frame creating a shift away from the familiar. Pierce applies and masters a depth-of-field perspective in order to construct a narration that is both associative and enticing. The abstraction allows the viewer to engage with their own personal memories as well as a more collective memory. 50 feet of String evokes painterly qualities. The film with its progressional flow, emits a sense of watching a painting slowly transpire before one’s eyes. Time and again, each new image that appears, enthuse a decoding process. Not from having to decipher the elusive images, but by affecting the viewer´s emotions and the perception of a place in the world and in the everyday.
The film allows the viewer to pause and reflect in brief intermissions created by the black frames and intertitles for the 12 segments. This also initiates anticipation of the next movement. The sound is equally important to the abstracted image. It is constructed, layered and processed to effortlessly engender emotional and temporal effects. The sound is a significant part of the viewing experience of this nearly hour long film.