Series: Between Here and Elsewhere
Three-colour hand-printed silkscreen on Hahnemühle paper
19 × 39 cm
Edition 30 + 2AP
2023
Series: Between Here and Elsewhere
Three-colour hand-printed silkscreen on Hahnemühle paper
19 × 39 cm
Edition 30 + 2AP
2023
Series: Between Here and Elsewhere
Two-colour hand-printed silkscreen on Bristolkarton paper
49.5 × 49.5 cm
Edition 24 + 2AP
2022
Series: Between Here and Elsewhere
Seven-colour hand-printed silkscreen on Hahnemühle paper
70 × 100 cm
Edition 10 + 2AP
2023
Series: Between Here and Elsewhere
Six-colour hand-printed silkscreen on Hahnemühle paper
70 × 100 cm
Edition 8 + 2AP
2022
Series: Between Here and Elsewhere
Seven-colour hand-printed silkscreen on Hahnemühle paper
70 × 100 cm
Edition 7 + 2AP
2023
Series: Between Here and Elsewhere
Seven-colour hand-printed silkscreen on Hahnemühle paper
70 × 100 cm
Edition 10 + 2AP
2022
Hahnemühle German etching paper, fine art print on 310 g/qm
71 × 59 cm
Edition 25 + 2AP
Hahnemühle German etching paper, fine art print on 310 g/qm
71 × 59 cm
Editions 25 + 2AP
2019
Exploring the powerful and irreconcilable tension between commercial advertising and fine art. Using an audio video installation playing on a loop, communicative languages warp, design is beautifully abstracted but blocked and concepts are made to jar.
The film abstracts the many signs and symbols of corporate advertising, social communication from their natural context, and observes them as art. In some cases, the beauty remains, in others meaning is obscured, significance is lost, disruption takes president and surfaces are played upon. This tension is profound; it is a powerful tension within, swinging precariously between a wish to resolve and a need to scream. It Might Blow Up, But It Won't Go Pop is a piece of work that is poised on this very delicate point.
The title of the film is taken from the looped lyric in De La Soul’s third album ‘Buhloone Mindstate’ released in Sept. 1993. The hookline "It Might Blow Up, But It Won't Go Pop" is repeated over and over, until the sound of a balloon popping replaces the final word "pop" - the hope of expanding their artistic popularity, without selling out.
A Film To Break Down Walls
Consisting of the entire canvas of the city of Berlin, as seen through the eyes of a camera lens, It Might Blow Up, But It Won’t Go Pop coincides with the celebration of the 30-year anniversary of the Berlin wall coming down this November. The city now reflects a fusion of commerce and creative expression: young, challenging, progressive.
Timely and universal in its expansive subject matter, this new piece of work reflects the push-and-pull tension between fine art and advertising, exploring the necessary and positive ways in which they continually inform one another. The film explores themes of dependency traversing between the two forms, and mirrors the search for coherence that most artists and commercial artists strive for throughout their careers. Focusing on societal compartmentalizing and categorizing that leads to inevitable tension and the pressure to conform, a constant stream of fragmented, compelling, juxtaposed imagery and sound, shows us that we do not need to conform – that walls are there to be broken down, and ideas and expressions can be shared fluidly.
For Shah this realisation that each form cannot completely survive without the other, is the creative force. Fine art demands to be seen and in order to do this, needs to be advertised, while advertising consistently looks toward art for influence, or to hijack ideas that meet the demand of its audience. This duality can be unified and celebrated. This necessary and relevant film strives to bring expression, and the work, to its highest peak where the two forms are unified. Commerce and art living as one in a unified world.
Directed & Produced by Vishal Shah
Music by Dr. Adam Stanović
First Editor - Jakob Kienzerle
Editor / Motion Designer - Serge Castro
Motion Designer - Dave Goodall
Photographer - Rick Schubert
Film Installation: 24/7 Single channel loop - networked over 6 signage display panels. Stereo sound
Duration: 3’ 00’’
Authorship: 2019
Origination: 4k Resolution 3240 x 3840 50fps 4:4:4 pixel encoding
Sound: Stereo 44.1 kHz/24 bit
Aspect Ratio: 27:32
Vellum is a moving sound sculpture with a serious bass. Projected 2D double images are aesthetically 3D extruded and in constant rotation. The plateau of each extrusion is either hidden or limited, holding and composing the pictorial plane. Movements are fast and slow turning into sculptural islands to the sound of an improvised double bass. Vellum is beautiful in detail and timely in each movement. Everything is concealed and only the end reveals the true story.
Director & Producer: Vishal Shah
Improvised Double Bass by: Eduardo Rodriguez
Director of Photography: Lewin St Cyr
Studio Assistance: Renata Kudlacek
3D Specialist & Technician: Rob Rauchfuss
3D Artist & Compositor: Peter Kienetz
Sound Design & Mastering: Benjamin Alejandro
Participants in Order of Appearance.
Paulina Vassileva. Kanti DeBiswas. Steve Baker. María Alché. Anthea Hamilton. Ksenia Maximova. Conrad Edwards. Ray Domingo.
Duration: 3’ 58”
Authorship: 2016
Origination: HD 1920 X 1080
Aspect Ratio: 16:9
epoh rises in the city of Mumbai where, beyond the Gateway of India, we see a diamond-studded pink city guarded by two tigers. epoh moves on. Europe flashes past. Continents emerge and disappear.
Finally he departs. What is epoh carrying? A mysterious orb fills his basket... He looks to it and takes comfort, then continues on his journey, battling on, into the unknown. Finally, when he can go no further, epoh delivers his message... In this short animation we are taken on an expedition - an adventure of discovery - into the unknown.
Although we witness the trials of epoh, and his quest to deliver his message, we are encouraged to reflect our own journey and ultimately, the universality of hope...
Director & Producer: Vishal Shah
Sound: Dr. Adam Stanović
Animation Assistance: David Abrantes & Rob Rauchfuss
Duration: 4’14’’
Authorship: 2013
Origination: HD 1920 X 1080
Aspect Ratio: 16:9
Pollen: a visual music experience structured around a series of thematic contrasts; light and dark, organic and synthetic, certainty and ambiguity, existence and emptiness. Perhaps the most important of these is an exploration of movement and stasis, since this central contrast is used to divide the film into three episodic moments; Pollen opens with the gradual unfolding of an image, thus enabling the viewer to explore its form and detail. However, this almost static moment is soon replaced by vigorous pulses of energy and motion that drive the film onwards. The sound-world enhances these contrasts; references to the elements - wind, water and metallic objects - tally with the title of the film and are in discourse with the images that Pollen presents.
Director & Producer: Vishal Shah
Sound: Adam Stanović
Colour: David Abrantes
Studio & Camera: Renata Kudlacek
Technical Advisor: Dr Roddy Cañas
Lighting Instruction: George Duck
Duration: 4’36”
Origination: DV & Motion
Aspect Ratio: 16:9
We don’t retrieve our memories, rather memory recreates itself continuously and in doing so produces its own narrative. The film consists of enlarged sequences from a mix of Super8 films collected and produced – cut, sequenced and layered into a moving image collage. Past and present is falling into the rafters of an infinite loop. Recollection begins with a hand reaching for a flower floating in water and emerging from the gentle ripples appears a little girl aged 9 (Renata) from the visual field, she dances, twirls around and slowly disappears again. A hand picks off a petal and the form of what appears at first glance to be hundreds of butterflies fan outwards. However, they are not butterflies, they are moths, since not everything in a recollection is always beautiful and dreamlike.
Directed & Produced by: Vishal Shah & Renata Kudlacek
Origination: Super 8mm
Duration: 1'00" Loop
Authorship: 2010
Aspect Ratio: 4:3
Seek Assistance is an aesthetically dark personal myth projected as noise and interference which intensifies with intrigue and mystery. The delicate investigation of micro materials is echoed by intricate lighting effects that appear to print the subject upon one’s eye. This micro interplay between sight and sound firstly illuminates the subject yet hints at macro forms that exist past the light, beyond any sound, and ultimately transcend the physical frame.
Director & Producer: Vishal Shah
Sound: Dr Adam Stanović
Performances: Seb Humprey & Lewis Campbell
Duration: 3'03'
Authorship: 2005
'The video Seek Assistance by Vishal Shah takes us to the starting point of a tube journey when our valid ticket is rejected. The system thus refuses to allow our passage. This is a work composed out of sharp and exact editing, distinct configurations of abstract light, form and image within the suggestion of a narrative collision. There is a fast and disjunctive economy at work within audio and vision pulse across the face of the other (both a literal face and the face of projected light). Visually there are strong hints of early modernist cinema and photography, Man Ray, Rodchenko and Moholy Nagy appear as references meeting visual forms that derives from a fast world of commercial video. We are left in a state of an in-between of passage, combined with interruption and detour. This is the place that a subject might either be composed or undone.' Review by Jonathan Miles
'...The mood intensifies with "Seek Assistance." Vishal Shah masterfully denies us access to signposts which might reveal what he is after. The sound design of Adam Stansbie is formidable - surprising, shocking and impressive. It is the contrasts - instant and subtle - that provoke and rivet our attention.' Review by Carol Goss
'Most of the 3D animation works I viewed were rife with cliché: smoke rings, intertwining rope-like lines, slowly spinning objects, and wonderfully deep, yet terribly familiar virtual scenes such as cloudy skies, seas, or infinitely repeated moving forms occurring at diminishing scale (usually resembling bats flying underwater or something equally surreal). In cases like this, it was incredibly difficult to forget about the easily identifiable generated environments and focus on compositional content. Vishal Shah’s “Seek Assistance,” with music by Adam Stansbie, was a definite exception. From an initial series of flashes and abstract patterns of light, a human head slowly revealed itself, moved through a series of transformations viewed through lighting screens, then unexpectedly shattered. Stansbie’s music deepened the dark visual space with accelerating/decelerating noisy clicks, bowed rhythms and granular streams operating in attractive counterpoint with Shah's images.' SEAMUS NEWS, July 2007, Issue 3
Everyday urban systems, transformed via a kaleidoscopic patterning, becomes the form and content of a cinematic meditation.
Bringing to play metallic systems, spaces and rhythms found in an urban landscape. These spaces direct and allow traffic to flow, The video echoes movement through composure and orchestrated configurations; thus allowing rhythmic formations to reside outside of their tangible context. Escalator encircles notions of repetition; in passage is where the viewer is situated with no entry or exit.
Director & Producer: Vishal Shah
Sound: Vishal Shah
Origination: DV
Duration: 5’37'
Aspect Ratio: 4:3
