ANNA FREEMAN BENTLEY

Drawn to the temporary, fictional nature of movie sets, this interest took Anna Freeman Bentley to an expansive and ornate house-turned-museum in Jeddah. Experiencing how the shooting of a film took over almost every aspect of the former home, this body of work interrogates some of the spaces that surrounded the set itself. Encountering images that imply some centre of activity happening elsewhere, the paintings explore the subtle balance between real and artificial, lasting and temporary. As such, the works become a questioning of the contrast between the image constructed through the lens and the one created in a painting.

To accompany this presentation, a film producer has continued the idea of constructed narratives by adopting the role of a scriptwriter and created a movie script. In her text entitled, ‘A ROW OF CURVES’, an anonymous viewer enters the gallery and responds to the paintings on view.