John Hurrell – 10 October, 2012

Three short films by the Italian artist Anna Franceschini are currently being presented at AUT’s St Paul St, in the large Gallery One space with the whopper dividing wall. Two are loops, being 16 mm film or Super8 film transferred to digital, while the other is a 16 mm film on a (whirring) projector on a timer.

Franceschini is an artist who loves orchestrating fleeting striations or specks of dust discovered on film, or quick-moving traces of blurred light that form clusters of sizzling glowing lines. The latter look like sparklers.

The best one, It’s All about Light (to Joseph Plateau)/2, starts off quite slowly and monotonously with pairs of flaming flares, but then its pace suddenly quickens to end in a frenetic flurry of oddly angled, rapidly flashing beams that take you by surprise. Its frenzied crescendo of light marks or smudges takes your breath away. There is no sound so this is quite an achievement.

Within this sensuous, carefully structured body of work Franceschini uses rocking horizontal motion or flickering strobes to bodily lure the viewer into trancelike rhythmical cadences.

This Light…film, and its larger screened companion It’s All about Light (to Joseph Plateau)/1 appears to have been made in a steel mill (for we see a workperson’s boot), though its subtle use of dark tone and controlled exposure hints it might not be. The showering sparks and distant rivers of fire might be caused by non-combustible, even electrical, sources.

The light in the third one, It’s All about Light and Death (to Joseph Plateau), is definitely electrical, using slow pans and spots with strobes to pick out stuffed animal heads and body parts as quick glimpses. A lion, fox, warthog, impala and Frisian cow are all photographed from different, quite startling angles, simulating a fire in an ancient cave that reveals mammalian eyes, ears, stretched chins and patterned flanks.

Interspersed within this narrative are odd ‘after-images’ of squiggly light and blank slides that function as foils to the dreamlike ‘primal’ imagery. They are inner body and optically ‘neural’, referencing their own processes - as opposed to ‘transparent’ unmediated sensation that seem to look, hear, smell and feel beyond the corporeal.

Lastly, as an installation this show cleverly exploits Gallery One’s dividing wall, so that whatever side you are standing on, you see against the dark planar edge the varying flickering reflections (on the wall behind it) of the other (unseen and silent) films. The barrier end becomes a pivotal point for the whole show, showcasing bouncing light from hidden high-illumination images you try and remember. A shrewd way of positioning the three related works so they interact, and a clear reference to the spreading propensities of light mentioned in the title.

John Hurrell

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