Hair Salon

'Hair Salon' is an 11 minute video that was first shown at the exhibition 'To be continued…' as part of the Helsinki Photography Festival. This exhibition was organised by Photographers Gallery, Hippolyte and the British Council. The exhibition sought to enrich photographic culture by a desire to transgress national, linguistic and institutional boundaries.

The video work ‘Hair Salon’ was made specifically for this project and was researched and planned during a SPACE Studios Residency after I won their 2003 Cultural Diversity award. Shot in Toronto and Venice, the video explores the use of photographic stills with real time video, but linked together via image manipulation where each image is altered and re-presented. This wholly constructed work reflected a new conceptual and technical development in my video production. It enabled me to explore concepts of time and space through the juxtaposition of the moving and still image. Subjectively, the video explores the idea of mesmerism, the hypnotic state induced by a number of disconnected events. It explores the awkwardness of things that disrupt the smooth flow of continuity. The video continually poses the question 'and?' I see a partial parallel between my understanding of ‘and’ as a montage concept and the way Deleuze has articulated the notion of ‘and’. The conjunction 'and' sets things free, it is a kind of creative stammer - a foreign use of language as opposed to a conformist and dominant one.