Turner Prize 2011

Hilary Lloyd was shortlisted for the Turner Prize in 2011, and her work was shown at Baltic in the Turner Prize 2011 exhibition.

Hilary Lloyd makes work which engages in various ways with the moving image, encompassing video projections, films on monitors, and slide projections. She foregrounds technical equipment as a sculptural medium, prominently displaying the AV equipment on which her work is installed.

Free from editing, Lloyd’s art is underpinned by a tension between the films’ seemingly casual making and often ambiguous subject matter, and the precise and almost obstructive positioning of the supporting equipment. Video projectors, DVD players and monitors are suspended on chrome columns, while broad tracks of black cabling run across the ceiling between the suspended projectors, ranks of DVD players and power supplies. These bulky objects engage actively with the architecture of the gallery, serving both to impede and choreograph visitors’ passage through the space.

Lloyd records her surrounding urban environment, addressing subjects such as buildings, construction sites, and a motorcycle workshop, as well as everyday and small-scale human scenes such as waiters working in a cafe, men washing cars, a man removing his vest, a woman building houses of cards, or a studio floor covered in paint patterns.

Lloyd’s recent exhibition at Raven Row, London, comprised five works across three spacious floors, each work minimally installed in a separate gallery. The works ranged from free-standing, split-screen monitor works to more elaborate grids of multiple images projected directly on the walls. Man 2010, takes the form of six projectors suspended to create a grid of abutted images of a man’s crotch, thigh, hand, arm – possibly drawn from a fashion magazine or advert. The jerky and occasionally loitering movement of the camera – hand-held and unpredictable – disrupts the rigid geometry of the grid. Trousers 2010, incorporates two sideways-mounted projectors, creating a single, narrow projection stretching the height of the gallery. We are presented with slowly shifting views of a man in a suit, again possibly from a fashion magazine.

Crane 2010 also included in the exhibition at Raven Row, is formed of a vertical monitor mounted at chest height on two floor-to-ceiling columns. In two juxtaposed shots, a crane momentarily moves sideways, and its juddering movement at once compounds and jars with the harsh ‘techno’ sound created by the films’ continual repetition. Tunnel 2010, misaligns two versions of the same briefly-snatched view of a city from inside a dark tunnel, which appear to have been shot on a camera held upside down. Sound and image again move harshly in and out of synch, then re-align with a jolt. Motorway 2010, collages four video projections of views, shot from below, of a vast elevated motorway bridge under construction. Almost devoid of movement or incident, each film possesses a poised, reflective stillness which trains our focus on the structure’s unlikely beauty.

• https://vimeo.com/77778481
• http://www.balticmill.com/whats-on/exhib...