SHEENA MACRAE
Sheena Macrae works the art of compression by playing with our societies’ fascination with speed, entertainment, information and nostalgia. She manipulates the product of the cultural industries, takes possession of it and, twisting the principle of post-production, becomes a sort of VJ (Video-Jockey), somewhere between Christian Marclay and Douglas Gordon, appropriating and parodying standardised forms of narration, Hollywood clichés or economic constraints underlying all-powerful Entertainment. Through a series of procedures, the material of film, a real ready-made, is emptied of all narrative content and returned to its superficial essence.
“Sheena Macrae’s videos might best be described as ‘compressions’: her massive feats of editing remix films into miniature, yet unabridged sagas: Pulp Fiction reduced to exactly one minute, Gone With the Wind crunched from 3.5 hours down to commercial break size. Their effect is something like speed-reading: images fly by in rapid sequence, focussing on only the key elements of action... Like a drug or a diamond, a screen-size cosmos for the taking. Ergonomic, perfect, and larger than life.” - Patricia Ellis, excerpt from Flatpack TV, 2005.
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