MIKE MARSHALL’S VIDEOS, PHOTOG...
Mike Marshall’s videos, photographs and soundscapes quietly transform and re-evaluate simple scenarios and ambient spaces. Just as the ‘minor’ events of daily life often only slowly reveal their interest and potential, Marshall’s work slows down the time of looking, emphasising close engagement and the sensory qualities of experience. In doing so it reverses conventional hierarchies of looking and at the same time provokes examination into the nature of our engagement with the immediate world around us.Each of Marshall’s video works have a rich and detailed sound component that fill and pressurise the depicted space. Ambient sounds are layered, re-orchestrated and often allied with musical composition to form a deep space filled with sonic events that both cut across, coincide, accelerate or slow down their visual counterparts.
His large-scale photographs present densely filled environments as ‘milieus’ with distinct ambient qualities and are full or ‘rich’ in terms of the textured detail provided by the format on which they are shot. Each uses an unexpected layering of depth and focus that places the viewer at an uncertain threshold somewhere between a generalised looking or ‘blank staring’ and a concentrated optical mode of vision.
Marshall’s multi-speaker soundscapes utilise the almost holographic representational qualities of sound to invite a listening and produce a fluid temporality that unsettles expectations of fixed space, either meticulously re-constructing familiar sonic environments, or overlapping one sound space over another. In ‘The Sound of Bombay’ (Tate Gallery St Ives 2004) a recording from a gallery roof terrace in the busy centre of Bombay was superimposed onto the ambient sounds of the St Ives Gallery terrace; gulls, sea, beach life mixing with a distant Asian metropolis. ‘Cloudburst’ (2005), presented recently at the Ikon Gallery, involved the recording and layering of individual droplets of water falling on different surfaces, with around 200,000 drops falling over a period of four minutes, the small noises slowly accumulating to become the sound of heavy rain.