The exhibition will include a number of Flaxton’s recent video portraits including his Bristol University Centenary Portraits, an ultra-high-definition, 12-minute film featuring around 200 of the 23,000 students and staff who make up the university community.
Other pieces on display include In Re Ansel Adams, shot on the spot where Ansel Adams, the great American photographer of the natural world, took one of his most famous photographs, Yosemite Valley, Winter, 1940; and Un Tempo, Una Volta, shot in Venice, in which the camera, placed on its back looking up at the sky, passes underneath the bridges on a gondola, seeing the sky and the tops of buildings at dusk.
On Wednesday 27 October, there will be a special premiere of Myth and Meaning in the Digital Age, a work funded by Channel 4 and the Arts Council.
The piece was originally begun in 1989 in response to L'Objet D'art dans l'Age Electronique, a television programme which opened the then-new European satellite channel La Sept. Directed by John Wyver, it featured the thoughts of Jean Baudrillard and Paul Virilio with regard to Walter Benjamin's famous question concerning whether or not a replica can hold any of the aura of the original work of art when reproduced.
Flaxton’s response premiered on Channel 4 in 1990. This work was then added to and premiered at the 1992 Bonn Biennale as a three-part project entitled The Colour Trilogy. Later in the nineties, this became a seven-part work entitled The Colour Myths. In Salisbury, it will premiere as a 14-part work under the title, Myth and Meaning in the Digital Age.
Terry Flaxton has been a video artist since 1976, as well as an acclaimed cinematographer. His work has been screened on TV, exhibited at festivals worldwide and has received numerous awards and nominations. In October 2007, he took up the position of Research Fellow in Creative and Performing Arts at the University of Bristol's Department of Drama: Theatre, Film, Television. He was recently awarded a Knowledge Transfer Fellowship by the Arts and Humanities Research Council.
Salisbury Arts Centre exhibition space is open Tuesday – Saturday 10am to 4pm and entry is free.