Charlotte Prodger is recognised for her audiovisual practice using equipment selected for its specific technological capacity, design history and subcultural aesthetics. In her largest solo show to date, she presents a new body of sculptural objects balanced by the feature length Stoneymollan Trail — Prodger’s first single channel video. The exhibition (titled 8004 - 8019 in reference to the RAL colour codes that Prodger has used here) builds upon her impulse for listing, incremental sequencing and the mapping of co-ordinates.
The grid is an ever-present motif in her work. Rectilinear pattern is used as a formal constraint for subjective narrative content that is often messy and slippery, shifting around in time and place. Moving between and blending the native aspect ratios of her mixed sources, Stoneymollan Trail comprises material from multiple formats: a personal archive of deteriorating miniDV tapes; high definition camera footage; iPhone videos; screenprinted graphic forms and recorded voice over. Stoneymollan Trail uses the geometry of the 16:9 (widescreen) and 4:3 (standard) aspect ratios as a way of bringing the spatial concerns of her former multi-monitor installations into the linear constraints of the single screen.
The physicality of the screen is brought into focus as a measure and mediation of subjectivity. Stoneymollan Trail considers screens both as objects in the world (monitors, windows, folding screens), layered internal rectangles within the video, and as framing devices through which culture and reality are shaped. Landscape is a recurring motif throughout this video, which traces a recent history of the medium of video as well as the artist’s personal history.
The sculptural objects made for Spike Island see Prodger using vertical and horizontal pictoral planes to consider screens as various ways of punctuating architectural space; blocking, dividing and revealing as the viewer navigates their way through the galleries. As Stoneymollan Trail uses the intimate physical materiality of video to frame autobiographical content, Prodger’s sculptural objects draw upon industrial materials and processes (aluminium, haulage tarpaulins, Perspex, powdercoating, RAL charts) and more traditional binary grid systems to think about the relationship of technology to the landscape and the human body.