The Wellcome Collection have launched their first major digital art commission with Chris Dorley-Brown’s ‘15 Seconds’, a glimpse into the changing lives of Essex children growing up over twenty years into adulthood. The work is a series of online triptych video portraits, bringing together two earlier projects involving the group with newly recorded footage. By turns funny, moving and poignant, these short pieces lay out the dramas of everyday liIn 1994, several hundred Colchester schoolchildren aged 8-11 were invited to make a 15 second video portrait expressing themselves any way they chose. Ten years later, Dorley-Brown tracked down some of the participants and filmed them shortly after they viewed their earlier footage. In 2014 he made a third series of video portraits. Brought together as a digital online artwork, the three selves of the participants now enter into a generational dialogue with each other.
The first set of video portraits were made in an era before the internet became a part of everyday life; the last were made in a time where self-presentation through social media is everywhere. Across these changes in medium and forms of expression Dorley-Brown’s ’15 Seconds’ presents concise and compelling accounts of growing up, thwarted ambition and the search to find what makes you happy in life.fe with keen and affecting precision.
View It here: 15seconds.wellcomecollection.org
About The Artist
Chris Dorley-Brown grew up on the south coast but has lived and worked in the east end of London for the last thirty years. Largely self-taught his cultural education was formed in east London in the late seventies, against a backdrop of strongly polarised political conflict and change. His influences are shaped by memory, both personal and those of others. Since 1993 he has been collaborating with artists, filmmakers, curators, performers and writers as well groups and inviduals in the public sphere in a variety of cultural contexts, primarily outside the art gallery,(radio,print,cinema, television ,the internet and architecture). www.modrex.com/
