Archive
Ed Florence
Mirrored
11.10.2019 – 08.11.2019
Mirrored at Flatland Projects is the first solo presentation for Birmingham based artist Ed Florance, comprising moving image, painting and sculpture made especially for this show. Through a series of 3D-rendered video works, still frame paintings and everyday objects, this body of work investigates the complexities of narrative linearity and suggests an environment where time has no clear beginning or end.
Florance’s multifaceted use of media is refined through a laborious, clinical and obsequious approach to making, in which the aesthetics of images - both moving and still - are generated and rendered to display an argument concerned with the politics of timeframes. Florance’s routine of simultaneously creating moving images and painting is concomitant; whilst computer generated images render, he paints and whilst paint dries, he works on 3D models.
Within this body of work Florance creates facsimiles that perform in unexpected ways, expanding the viewer’s imaginative boundaries. Subtle historical art references to Chris Burden’s Porsche with Meteorite and The Vatican’s Sistine Chapel are present but also somehow unfamiliar. Florance manipulates the artificial so that it is both less and more than the real, thus disintegrating the importance of the medium entirely - the work becoming both uncanny and 1 surreal.
Both following and derailing prosaic methods of display, the artist evaluates the conditions where the work exists, to only present what is absolutely necessary. Here time is undefined, unconstrained and unlimited; videos play and paintings pause in a space as vast as the ocean and as timeless as infinity.