Ghost Train

“Ghost Train” (installation film, neon and sound) Solo Show 2002, was commissioned by Transit Space, E. and transferred to Paco Das Artes, Sao Paulo, Brazil and exhibited with New York artist Jordan Crandall, with the support of the Paco Das Artes and British Council.

Ghost Train is a 16mm film installation incorporating two neon sculptures (a pink aeroplane and a green train) the light emitted from the neon enhances the light from the film negative giving a nightmarish quality to an otherwise indifferent suburbia now a post-apocalyptic magenta, cyan and green. Lacking substance, the negative images become shadows, juxtaposed with a digitally manipulated reading of Beckett – “nothing stirring, nothing seen, nothing, empty dark blank walls, walls, walls…”. Shadow becomes the trace of time or memory, neither substance nor thought, not belonging to the world of objects, merely an interruption in the path of light, or consciousness. This work also continues my interest in the journey both as a metaphor and as a passage of time for the structure of the work itself.

Ghost Train is reviewed by Richard Dyer (pages 78-79) and by Peter Wollen (pages 40 –41) in ‘Electronic Shadows. The Art of Tina Keane’ Black Dog Publishing 2003, ISBN 1 901033 44 9.