www.tank.tv : Claire Hope : 15.01.09 - 31.01.09

CLAIRE HOPE
www.tank.tv
15th - 31st January 2009

Originally from North Yorkshire, Claire Hope is now based in London; graduating with an MA Fine Art from Chelsea College of Art in 2004. Claire has produced a number of solo installations and shown widely in group exhibitions; recently screening video work internationally as part of the touring transmediale.07 video selection and presenting a solo exhibition at Way East Project Space, London in May 2008. Claire was also a 2007/8 LUX Associate Artist.

Claire’s video and performance projects are choreographed to emphasise the personal, subjective sphere of human life. Her work often responds unconventionally to particular environments or social contexts; disrupting and subverting our associations with them by combining narratives ranging from the surreal, strange and unsettling to the humorous, playful and emotive. Video work has drawn from existing, improvised and written speech with non-linear narratives often mapped to the filmed space. Recently Claire has developed original scripts for video projects conceived as highly orchestrated linear journeys.

Claire is interested in social, political and economic systems and how these may represent human beliefs, motivations and actions. She links the private sphere of perception to the public realm of interaction and its formal or informal contexts in work often set in individual locations. The way power and desire are experienced or expressed through such relationships
is a central theme, also how this relates to the urge to present and the expectations of viewers. In her work Claire combines information from different - often segregated or professionalized - areas of knowledge. She creates fictional relationships which hope to exist across these apparently disparate contexts - blurring the boundaries of a perceived reality and fiction and deliberately implicating the maker and viewer in this choreography.

‘In all honesty there’s nothing I’d like more’ of 2005 combines a shifting monologue of official pronouncements, emotive reactions, personal statements and musical performance in a choreographed journey around an unconventional landscaped public space. In ‘Your task will fail to be realised (I’ll do what I can)’ 2005, a performative journey around a lavish corporate waiting area portrays an anarchic and illogical array of characterisations amid an ambiguous relationship
with the cameraman.

In ‘Virgin Soil’ of 2007 a subjective arrangement of video and still footage of the built environment (later used in 2008) is combined with a non-narrative soundtrack. ‘Shredder Heaven’ 2008, combines an apparently passionate private performance with a repetitive administrative task. ‘Complex Financial Instruments’ of 2008 joins still and video imagery of the built environment in different states of development, to recorded and live private decision-making around a future building of ambitious landmark proportions. Exhibited at as an event-based installation the discussion became increasingly absurd amid growing references to shared mythic belief systems.

Works of interest; by Adam Chodzko and Stuart Croft, have been selected for their differing approaches to narrative representation, especially within a relationship to our environment, social or institutional forms of individual or collective action and to subverting familiar forms of depiction. Very special thanks to Adam and Stuart for showing their work.

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