Polarised

Polarised was first created as a collaborative solo exhibition during the artists' seven-week residency at Block 336.

"If sunglasses expose our anxieties around seeing and being seen, Kim and Laura’s work, Polarised, draws this particular contemporary phenomenology into focus. In Polarised we are presented with lenses that alternately allow or block views into an installation, simultaneously reflecting and refracting projected moving image in a space, incorporating sculpture, lighting and sound. Here the artists present light as a form of control, with a role both in social and cultural posturing, as well as in the dynamics of looking and being looked at, riffing on the formal relationships and cultural connotations embedded into the shaded gaze. This is a work that destabilises the act of looking, one that forces us to see it in a different light. In Polarised Kim and Laura create a carefully constructed enterprise, a world of light and sound where our experience of it is electrifying."

The video incorporated in the Polarised installation has subsequently been exhibited as a single-channel video work at Tornado Sands, alongside works by Wolfgang Tillmans, Jem Cohen, Criodhna Costello, Lizzie Hughes, David Blandy, Fikret Atay, Jane Topping, Katy Dove, Roderick Buchanan and Sadie Benning.

The video 'Polarised' is a self-reflective video that circumspectly unravels a cluster of relationships. Recorded on-site in the gallery while developing a collaborative exhibition of the same name, the work exposes dynamics between two artists whose processes are both characterised by a heightened awareness of the sensual effect produced between the electric bodies of light and camera, between video and sound, and between the reflector and the reflected.

Polarised was a first collaboration between Kim Coleman and Laura Buckley and was originally developed as part of an installation created as Artists in Residence at Block 336, London (2016).

Kim Coleman’s solo projects include commissions for Kings Cross Granary Square (London) and MSDOCKVILLE (Hamburg). Screenings include Talbot Rice (Edinburgh) and Minneapolis Film Festival. Solo projects with collaborator Jenny Hogarth include the Serpentine Cinema: CINACT (London), Frieze Projects (Frieze London), Glasgow International (Glasgow), and the ICA (London). She was a LUX Associate Artist and National Gallery of Scotland Artist Fellow.Laura Buckley’s solo projects include EIGEN+ART Lab (Berlin), Site Gallery (Sheffield), Bold Tendencies (London), Supplement (London). Screenings include Hanger Bicocca (Milan), the Serpentine Gallery (London) and British Council & Film London International touring programme. Buckley has been shortlisted for the Converse/Dazed Award and the Jarman Award. Collaborative projects include a live performance with Paul Purgas at the Whitechapel Gallery (London).

The initial Polarised exhibition was supported by a-n The Artists Information Company. The screening at Arcade East was supported by University of the Arts, London.

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