Elizabeth McAlpine, Ends (Sprayed Sound), 2017, C-Type Print

McAlpine’s recent series, Ends (Sprayed Sound) consists of a number of synaesthetic C-Type prints printed from the terminal ‘ends’ of a 35mm film reel, layered, rather than arranged side by side. Here, the viewer is presented with a photographic ‘instant’, as a once moving image is made static, and a once collective film strip made singular, by the condensation of each layer of film into one composite whole. The specific ends become abstract beginnings, folded by the artist into concertinas of nostalgia and critique. Curtains of colour bleed through the margins, evoking the blotted paper of a litmus test, all the while referencing the history of twentieth century art – from post-painterly Abstraction, to Dada, and Fluxus. The colour comes from the part of the film strip that records the sound, endowing the works with a sensory quality, as their titles suggest. The ends possess the ghosts, the remnants of the footage - the ‘cinematic sediment’ of human interaction; the ends record the accidents, the scratches and abrasions – the memory of a previous image: a readymade, made new.


Elizabeth McAlpine (b. 1973 London) lives and works in and France. Selected solo exhibitions include With Time on My Hands at Laurel Gitlen, New York; Cinematic Sediments, Artopia Gallery, Milan; Tip Toe at Laura Bartlett Gallery, London and Imaginary Solutions at SPACEX in Exeter. Her work has been included in group exhibitions at numerous institutions including National Modern Art Gallery and Contemporary, Rome; The Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; Kunstverein Freiburg, Freiburg; SMFA, Boston; The Metropolitan Museum of Art,New York; Perth Institute of Contemporary Art, Australia and Gertrude Contemporary, Melbourne; Spike Island, London; The Barbican, London; Kadist Foundation, Paris, deCordova Museum and Sculpture Park, Lincoln, MA. McAlpine's work is also represented in numerous international public collections including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York and The Government Art Collection, UK.