Juliette Blightman
b. 1980
The work of Juliette Blightman (born Farnham, 1980, lives in London) demands that the viewer refocus his or her attention. Using film and slide works, and direct yet subtle interventions in the gallery space, Blightman's work frames and enacts a certain kind of unadorned reality. Within a structure marked out by deliberately simple gestures, the marking of time gradually gives way to a sense of epiphany. In a series of 16mm films made since 2005, Blightman uses the basic parameters of the medium to emphasise the reality of what is in front of her camera. Each work consists of a single shot, the length of which is dictated by the standard three-minute duration of the film stock. In as a period Blightman's compositions are characterised by an objectivism that is gradually infected with the minute and shifting experience of passing time. The rigid, almost schematic approach to representation is reminiscent of the novels of Alain Robbe-Grillet, in which the perspective is limited to the surface of visual experience, and in which – to use the words of Roland Barthes – the object "never conceals a secret, vulnerable heart beneath its shell". Another characteristic of Blightman's work…
Films