A Play in Time

The work explores the construction of visual space and practices of space and everyday life through moving image, in the context of an urban park.

'A Play in Time' is a solo exhibition and book publication. This double screen video work and publication, commissioned by Photoworks UK and Brighton and Hove Arts Commission, develops concerns with practices of space in the recreational context of a public urban park, addressing the relationship between technologies of vision and social site and the ethics of the relationship between observer and observed.

It continues research into the relationship between daily life and the environment. The editing draws attention to experiences of duration and continues my research into representations of temporality through the interval between visual perception and recollection.

The related publication by Photoworks contains essays by Rebecca Drew, Claire MacDonald, David Alan Mellor, and David Chandler, along with an interview with the artist.

A Play in Time is a video work filmed in St Ann's Well Gardens in Hove, historically the site of one of the first British film studios set up by George Albert Smith in the 1890's. The video explores the activities which take place within a public space of recreation, celebrating the incidental and the everyday. Interweaving off screen sound with a doubling of visual image it meshes seasonal and chronological change with subjective experiences of the passing of time, drawing attention to the play between perception, memory and reverie.

"Susan Trangmar's finely detailed work activates a visual taxonomy that reveals equivalencies between moments and images in the natural world and human gesture…events seems to assemble themselves into visual scenes within an ambient acoustic field, and then to dissolve, or disassemble out of sight. …The philosopher Elizabeth Grosz has talked about ‘fluid corporeality' to describe a condition of being that suggests the interconnection between the inside and outside of the body, the means through which subjectivity is always in the process of becoming and changing in ways that are inscribed in the body's patterns and actions. It is within these terms that A Play in Time attends to agency and identity, and to sexuality. Stepping away from narrative and character, it lights on patterned activity and the dynamics of relationality within a space."

--Claire MacDonald, ‘A Dance to the Music of Time' in A Play in Time Photoworks 2008