http://youtu.be/DFseLoUJ5x4

‘Home is where the heart is – a three screen video portrait of Dario Os’ is an intimate film shot during the unusual experience when the artist had an unexpectedly fortunate opportunity to go and stay with a complete stranger in the person’s home based in Northern Italy. Steadman has focused on the concept of “home” within our culture, and more specifically the repetitive activities performed in the home, as a place embodying comfort and safety. His recent series of filming subjects in their own home allows the knickknacks on the table, the colour of the walls, and the style of furniture all to become elements that reveal more about the true essence of a subject’s personality than simply the image they want to present. 

In his latest film, ‘Home is where the heart is – a three screen video portrait of Dario Os,’ Steadman collaborated with his subject as the two strangers spent a week learning about each other and discussing the performative nature of how a person sees themselves, how they want to be seen and the image they actually project. The objects and the setting surrounding the subject exude a persona or mood which brings a new impact to the meaning of words being said and brings attention back to the person in the video.

HOME IS WHERE THE HEART IS - A THREE SCREEN VIDEO PORTRAIT OF DARIO OS

Presented on four projections hanging on both sides of the viewer with the visuals initially focused on the landscape passing by as if through the windows of a car, dictated by the road’s route.  The piece is shot from the perspective of the driver.  

The viewer follows the journey of an anonymous transient individual in constant motion and isolated from interacting with the world.  Until country landscape leads to a scene shot in a city hotel room with unclear anticipation of a visitor’s arrival.


Autobahn

Steadman's multi-media installation includes objects, video, and photography.  The piece develops the artist's interest in themes surrounding the state of solitude / being isolated; feeling lonely / being alone; memory and loss.

Inspired by a recent visit to a children's hospital, "puste puste heile heile," (a German phrase said to children suffering or in pain which literally translates to "blow blow heal heal", words to give comfort and hope) the piece focuses around an assembled pile of broken glass.  A personal object from the artist's childhood that was once whole, and is now broken.  Surrounding the pile of broken glass are mirrors and windows reflecting and showing projections evocative of past or present, as an archaeological study to retrace the sensibility of a child's ability to invest magic in the power of a phrase like "puste puste heile heile" with the complete belief that those words will make everything alright.


puste puste heile heile

A visual disorder when a person suffers a loss of movement vision in all three directions.

Video still taken from:
'The English Motorway System' 2012

Motion Blindness

 Format:     5-channel video installation
                           5 monitors; 5 DVD players.  
                          ( 10 mins looped, 5 DVD’s synched.,colour, 
                          10 synched audio tracks.)


The interwoven audio tracks of this five screen synchronised video installation portray the mind of the solitary creative being. The spoken word audio text was written and recorded before the video filming began. The viewer hears the subject's layered thoughts between the five screens, across ten speakers, sometimes in synch, sometimes in chaos and hard to understand. The visuals are a slow meditative presentation of the writer's daily rituals as he contemplates his work, his social sense of self, and the world around him.


i know...i know...i know...i know it is indeed time for lunch

Format: 
 4-monitors (or 4 projections) each with stereo speakers; 4 DVD players.  
(10:30 mins looped, 4 DVD’s synched.,colour, sound.)

With the four-channel video installation, 'I am writing this with my left hand although I am strongly right-handed’; cSteadman continues to work with issues around loss, memory and solitude. With a focus on understanding the psyche of the solitary being as one of choice and also as one of fear (hiding from the world).  The source material was filmed in an abandoned psychiatric ward that was built in the 1800's in former East Germany and follows the trace of footsteps – or is followed by them. An intense study of the evocations and resonances of the site, the work explores ongoing interests around isolation and alienation - be it in a domestic space, a social situation, or an urban landscape. The institutional setting lends itself to thoughts about people who become imprisoned within themselves and restrained by perceptions manufactured by their own mind.

The soundtrack (composed by the artist himself) further aids these readings - alternating as it does between stretches of silence and periods of eerie noise and spoken word.


I am writing this with my left hand although I am strongly right-handed

The Only Way Down is Down
4-monitor totemic elevator video installation
11:11 mins., looped, 4 synched DVDs, 8 synched audio tracks.

Steadman’s new video installation, ‘The Only Way Down is Down,’ is presented on 4-vertically stacked monitors and explores, through the tension and repetition of the opening and closing of elevator
doors, the banality of urban modernisation by teasing the viewer with the hidden dynamic of what goes on behind closed doors when anonymous strangers are forced to share a confined space.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BMNQrtP6rW8

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Christopher Steadman