Anthony Mc Call is a British artist , born 1946, who overlap different art forms such as film, sculpture, installation, drawing and performing.
Mc Call’s earliest films were documents of outdoor performances and they were different in the way of minimal use of elements , for example fire. This was during the 70’s when Mc call was a key figure in the AvantGardeLondon film-makers co-operative.
It was in 1973 after Mc Call moved to New York that he developed his “Solid Light” film series, which were projections that show the sculptural qualities of the beam of light. In darkened, haze-filled rooms, the projections create an illusion of three-dimensional shapes, ellipses, waves and flat planes that gradually expand, contract or sweep through space.
In these works, the artist sought to deconstruct cinema by reducing film to its principle components of time and light and removing the screen entirely as the prescribed surface for projection.
The works also shift the relationship of the audience to film, as viewers become participants, their bodies intersecting and modifying the transitory forms.
At the end of the 1970s, McCall stopped making art. Over 20 years later, he provided a new dynamic and re-opened his ‘solid light’ series.
This time using digital projectors rather than 16mm film. Through his involvement in expanding the notion of cinema, which enabled a more complex experience of projection.
You enter a dark space, but there is no sound. The digital projector is silent, and there are now two of them, located above you, with the projected figure, also now double, on the floor at your feet.
Over the 16 minutes of this projection, you tend to observe the tracing on the floor more assiduously than you do with a horizontal piece like Line.
In order to tease out the logic of its configuration in time, a logic that also defines the moving veils of light that fall from above--though you know this correlation more than perceive it.
Two figures is an ellipse that contracts and expands while the other figure, a wave, travels toward it; there is also a line that rotates through the wave, complicating both forms. At the same time, a very slow filmic 'wipe' connects the two figures such that the one is always eclipsing the other, making breaks, which produce apertures in the veils of light, and forging connections, which produce closures, in the process. Gradually, too, you see that, in the course of a cycle, one figure turns into the other ellipse becomes wave and vice versa. This is the experience of 'Between You and I' (2006), one of the six vertical projections installed at Hangar Bicocca.
