Shown at Compton Verney, UK
29 October – 10 December 2006
Compton Verney premiered Liz Rideal’s film, shot at Niagara, Burleigh Falls and Big Cedar in Canada. Projected onto the Capability Brown landscape at Compton Verney it focused attention on the mesmeric power of scenery and provoked a visual debate between real and filmed nature. Shot on Super 8, this silent film is a conscious meditation on the beauty of the natural world. It tracks the movement of water, snow packed firm on land, a frozen lake, wheeling gulls, camouflaged deer, rainbows, and the snow laden branches of trees. The result is an enigmatic portrayal of a particularly distinctive terrain, which was projected onto the dramatic backdrop of a lake and trees at Compton Verney, illuminating the immediate landscape as it descended into dusk. Fall, River, Snow enabled the gallery to extend its programme beyond the confines of the building. The landscape at Compton Verney acted as a film screen for the projections, but rather than merely providing the physical backdrop for the project, it offered another context for the unfolding drama in Rideal’s films. Rideal’s work revolves around issues of repetition, scale, motion and colour.
Rideal’s photographic contextual work was shown concurrently in the galleries at Compton Verney.
Liz Rideal has an enduring fascination with the beauty of ephemera, with what she has described as “clarity containing chaos.” She has captured semi-abstract images of falling draperies, oceanic currents, tangled roots and portraits obscured by a gestural veil of hair. Here she pushes the organic ambiguity further by projecting Super-8 film of nature onto the natural environs of Compton Verney. Shot early this year in Canada, the silent film follows cascading water, a circling flock of gulls and a deer threading its way through woodland. Juxtaposed with the actual changing landscape, the sequences take on an eerie, almost luminous aura. Compton Verney, to December 10.
Robert Clark, Guardian Guide, 28 October 2006
Rideal’s silent film, shot in Niagara, Burleigh Falls and Big Cedar, Canada, is a meditation on the power of nature which premieres against the backdrop of Compton Verney’s landscaped gardens.
Jackie Wullschlager, Financial Times Magazine, 28 October 2006
The Canadian wilds are transposed to English parkland in the new film projection of nature on to nature.
The Independent, Five Best Exhibitions, 11, 15, 18,21, November, 2 December 2006
Liz Rideal’s lyrical Super8s untame Nature by projecting the Canadian winter onto Warwickshire parkland.
The Independent on Sunday, The Top Fifty, 19 November 2006