No, there was no red

Hannah Rickards’s two-screen film is based on spoken accounts of a displaced image of a city seen over Lake Michigan as the result of rare temperature inversion mirages. The subjective divergences, consistencies, echoes and counterpoints of these accounts, form the core of the piece.

No, there was no red is a two-screen rear projection, centered on the framing of description in language, gesture and sound. It explores the relationship between atmospheric phenomena and experience of them. Beginning from research in to an optical atmospheric occurrence, a projected image caused by a temperature inversion and working with a group made up of its witnesses, Rickards recorded their descriptions.

The work is built gradually and is the result of a painstaking process of accumulation, transcription, organisation and re-working of material in order to compose a piece that can use that material musically, finding in it the rhythms and pauses, counterpoint of voice and gesture to sit within the diagrammatic structures of the piece. Those musical textures are not limited to sound or the voice of those filmed, but extend in to the geometries of the surroundings within the footage, the changing or passing light, as well as gestures or movements made by those figures.

The rear projection of the work reiterates the displacement of the image in a temperature inversion mirage, in which an image is displaced vertically and laterally from beyond the horizon. Thus the vantage point for the work being towards the source of the image: the projection mediated by the two screens, which themselves form a horizontal line.

What is being described in the work is an image in relation to a horizontal line, and is described in terms of a long rectangle or a ‘really long, long photograph’ - the two screens therefore echo this long rectangle, with the angling of the screens (which are joined along the middle to produce one internal space on the screen) locating a viewer in relation to the three chairs in visible in the room. The room in which the work was filmed is a meeting room in a town community centre, and elements of the room (projection screens, windows and blinds, skirting boards, fire alarms) used or referred to by the participants in the piece.

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