Guy Sherwin: Breathing Rooms

Guy Sherwin is an artist for whom cinema is not storytelling and not representation, but a process of light, time, and attention. He began as a painter, and this background is evident throughout his practice: film, for him, is a way of working with form, rhythm, surface, and with how images organize perception. Guy Sherwin works across a wide range of formats: short silent 16mm films (Short Film Series); poetic investigations of childhood experience "Messages"; explorations of optical sound on film (Railings, Cycles #3); and live performances in which cinema becomes an event unfolding in real time (Paper Landscape, Man with Mirror). Since 2006, together with Lynn Loo (also on CIFRA), he has created performances using multiple 16mm projectors (Vowels & Consonants), sometimes collaborating with improvising musicians. "Views From Home" is one of Guy Sherwin’s quietest and, at the same time, most densely layered works. Filmed in his flat in East London, the film observes how sunlight slowly moves through rooms over the course of the day, and across the façades of buildings seen through the windows. At times, Sherwin set a time-lapse camera running and left the house, allowing empty rooms to become a stage for the movement of light and shadow. On the floor below, saxophonist Alan Wilkinson was rehearsing. The film’s soundtrack is composed from recordings made while Wilkinson was playing: Sherwin walked from room to room, capturing the sound of the saxophone mixed with noises from the street. Image and sound do not illustrate one another; instead, they coexist, creating a sense of time as something physical and palpable. Guy Sherwins says: ❝ On one level my current practice is, as it always was, derived from a curiosity about time, light, illusion, presence, absence – the fundamentals of our lives and our awareness. The work is varied in the forms that it takes, and this too has always been the case. Thus there are short silent films, live projection performances using several projectors (sometimes performed with my partner Lynn Loo), hand-drawn experiments with images that generate optical sounds, looped gallery installations, and more recently, single-screen digital works ❞ Later, "Views From Home" was re-edited as a live performance. In this version, sound gains an additional temporal layer: the soundtrack uses a recording of Alan Wilkinson improvising on saxophone in 1987, while during the live event Wilkinson once again plays saxophone, accompanying his former self. Past and present, recording and live action overlap, turning each screening into a singular, unrepeatable event. This format was presented, among other occasions, at Evolution Leeds in 2006. Views From Home* is a clear example of how Guy Sherwin transforms everyday life into cinema without narrative, yet with intense concentration: cinema as observation, as the breathing of space, as the shared existence of light, sound, and time. Currently On View 📍”Absolute Now”, installation at Danielle Arnaud Gallery, London, March 13 – April 28. 📍”The Art of Printing”, screening/performance, not/nowhere, London, Saturday 21st March, 2 - 3.30pm 📍”The Art of Printing”, workshop, not/nowhere, London, Saturday 28th March 10 - 4pm 📍”Bolex weekend in Brussels”, Brussels, April 10-12