Marco Calí

C4RD Moot Series presents the work of Marco Calí, developed as part of our Onilne Residency programme. A graduate in the MA from Central Saint Martins and BA from Chelsea, Calí’s work draws from notions of everyday life, death and procreation. Calí is especially interested in ideas of narrative and play, the relation between ‘reality’ and what can best be described as memory, dreaming, fairy tale, ‘other-worldly’ or put simply, how fact and fiction sit with respect to each other. For the month of August 2010, Calí made drawings based on the 1959 film, Tiger Bay. Drawing on three sheets of tracing paper, he recreated scenes from the film, as still-life.  On each sheet are drawn elements from a single frame as the camera moves in the shot.  By removing the figures from the scene he attempted to reconstruct the set-up, effectively re-creating a still-life of the a fictional scene of a past moment. Displaying sets of drawings from various scenes in series, various time-scales arise - that of the layered drawings in each ‘frame’, that of the ‘frames’ shown side-by-side and that of the drawn/observed act. The drawings are both layered on one another as well as set out in a film-strip-like setting.

Please join us for the reception for this exhibition 6 - 8pm Wednesday 8 September 2010 or during the exhibition Wednesday 8 September - 11 September 2010. Centre for Recent Drawing is open especially for this exhibition 12 - 6pm from Wednesday to Saturday at 2 - 4 Highbury Station Road, Highbury Islington, London. C4RD is a Registered UK Charity 1123530, and would particularly like to acknowledge the support for this exhibition of ARTUPDATE.COM/.

Here are his reflections on the work:

“The choice of Tiger Bay as the film source for the images was varied.  As well as the questions that are opened up by narrative in film combined with the careful ink drawings that mimic etchings, I am also interested in the notion of a recent history depicted in film and how this colours our perception of that past.  Tiger Bay was released in 1959 and so spans a time when my mum was a child in England.  In this sense the film is a recording of a living memory, one that to some extent I am personally connected with.  Additionally and linked to this, the film was part of a verite approach to film making that was just coming into being in British cinema so that sets and actors were 'true-to-life'.

Initially I wanted to concentrate exclusively on depicting 'still-life' images from the film, but as I selected the scenes I decided that a mixture of interior and still-life would make for a more varied series and would give more scope for experimenting with the source material.

As the four-week drawing cycle progressed, I became less concerned with reconstructing a scene neatly, so that successive layers would correspond as exactly as possible to give an overall impression of the set-up, and concentrated more on constructing the scene from non-contiguous shots so that the displacement of the camera in time and space would be more evident.  In this sense the overlaid drawings that result have something of the cubist principles about them, this is especially obvious with the last five images which are put together so as to recreate a desk that appears in several scenes.

I have found the discipline of the residency experience very useful.  The realisations that in essence these drawings animate inanimate objects and that the spatial relationship between objects and scenery offers ground for interpretation have both been very positive outcomes that are already feeding into future work.”

Marco  Calí

8 - 11 September 2010

C4RD Moot Series

Centre for Recent Drawing

2-4 Highbury Station Rd LONDON N1 1SB

+44 2032396936 Charity No.1123530 Wed- Sat 12-6pm

Tiger Bay