PayneShurvell is pleased to present ‘CAST’, an exhibition of new photographic and video work by Aidan McNeill.
For her first solo exhibition at the gallery, McNeill takes us behind the curtains of musical theatre’s most extravagant fictions to document a very different kind of production
In a series of large-scale photographic works, McNeill references both the Romantic tradition, and the romance of the theatre. At first glance, the photographs seem to image an ethereal world of shadows and light. However, underlying are the signs of the mapping of staged action. Prop tape, scratches and lines of trap doors highlight the overall mechanics of the whole within this systematic collaboration of production.
McNeill also presents Performance 349: a video installation recorded from the live feed of a Musical Director conducting the orchestra of a major West End Musical. Contrasting with the Director’s impassioned gestures, the film is sound-tracked by a stream of letters and numbers as the Deputy Stage Manager calmly and simultaneously calls into action an intricate pattern of lighting and visual effects that recreate the drama on stage.
In deconstructing the workings of the show itself, ideas of authorship and spectacle are questioned, so that the onlooker’s role takes centre stage in a complex interplay of placement, manipulation and control.
