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Rebecca Birch , Great Northern, Video, 45mins, Still
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Rebecca Birch, Point, Video Installation, 2011
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White Screen

Rebecca Birch

solo exhibition a
19 March - 23 April 2011
18th April, Event marking the collaborative work with
Dan Coopey, Francesco Pedraglio and Laura Wilson
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The Agency is pleased to present White Screen, a solo exhibition of media and performance artist Rebecca Birch.   Within an installation featuring film pieces and live interventions Rebecca Birch will trace the evident and contingent aspects of her practice.

The exhibition will premier the film piece Great Northern , which was shot during 24hour darkness in the arctic circle in Canada in 2009.

The real confessionary format reveals a detailed account of a landscape and life in a harsh environment and the eternal issues surrounding industrial progress, people's livelihoods and the threat of climate change and its effects on both.

Rather than relying on visual narrative, Birch creates a portrait of a Northern frontier town through the subtitle narrative, relaying her at times awkward conversations with the townspeople. Birch's strategy of placing her subjects into the context of an unrehearsed live performance paints a social picture, records the history of a specific location, and reveals an image of the landscape and its natural and unnatural changes purely through narration and dialogue. Birch uses the film camera as a tool, which both attracts and repels her subjects. By being off camera but audible in the dialogue she manipulates but also confesses herself. Surprising intimacy and also blunt aggression come to the fore as the artist tests her boundaries and that of her subjects.

Point , is a series of works, which use the same interview techniques as Great Northern , the result is however not documentary but the distillation of the gestures used to describe a landscape. In Point [Sulphur Mountain] Birch retraces the physical gestures people make to visually accompany their verbal description of a mountain, extracting from them silent shadow play. The work reveals itself through projections of the negative space framed by the gesture.

During the exhibition the artist will make a number of fieldtrips carrying the film Great Northern whilst driving in a northerly direction for a day and screening the work at the point of arrival. This action will be witnessed and responded to by an invited guest each time, the interaction taking a different form each time. One of the guests, the writer/curator Francesco Pedraglio, will compose a text to mark his experience.

The exhibition will present these works and contingent works as an installed ensemble, allowing the ideas to interact with each other, to be concluded by the artist or her collaborators and for new lines of enquiry to be opened up. Indebted to the legacy of fluxus Birch's work is often co-authored by chosen collaborators from the artistic network but also from the general public, thus blurring the differentiation between author/s and audience.

Rebecca Birch lives and works in London, she studied at Goldsmiths and The Slade and has exhibited widely.   Solo exhibitions include Thirty-seven days to know a Mountain at Galeri Aneks, Poznan and Lanskip at HotelMariaKapel, Holland (in collaboration with Charles Danby), with projects at Quare, London and the Hepworth, Wakefield forthcoming in 2011. Her performance framework MicroPerformance was presented at The Whitechapel, Milton Keynes Gallery and the Agency during 2010 and in May of the same year, she created the seminal live broadcasting electronic project Field Broadcast with the artist Rob Smith. Many of these conceptual practices are ongoing.