Apex [2014]

3 min 17 sec, HD video, colour, silent.

Apex shows a photographic image in development; in a dark-room a single 35mm negative is enlarged and printed. The image is the culmination of a number of 35mm stills displayed across a single plane. It is a kind of hieroglyph, or the pinnacle of a pyramid, from which a site might be read. The work looks to motifs found within the 1930s Egyptian revival architecture of a nearby cinema, and draws in other sites such as a funeral directors’ ‘Embalming’ window, and a dispensing-pharmacy that offers photographic film-processing services.

Apex was commissioned by Tintype Gallery as one of eight silent films responding to the Essex Road, on which the gallery is also located. The works were screened in the gallery window from dusk every evening between December 2014 to January 2015. Review from 'this is tomorrow' can be read here.