Stuart Pound

Work by Stuart Pound has been shown regularly in Saison Vidéo since 2006, and now
L' Espace Croisé is showing a first solo selection of his work. Recent video has
involved appropriating images from DVDs purchased in charity shops in London, of
several well known Hollywood action films. In Chase, Run and Shooting Loops they
are re‐spun by turning the image on its side with a slight time delay between each
image panel making a semi‐abstract animation. The audio track is cut along with the
moving image to give a tense reverberating sound.
Other works are driven by their music. In Hopeless and Vampire Bat music by the
band Evangelista is paired with reprocessed images from Pabst's Pandora's Box
(hopeless love for Louise Brooks) and Murnau's Nosferatu starring Max Schreck.
In Postcard an early erotic photograph from Paris is processed into the moving
image of a young woman posing beside her mirror. She becomes the Chloris
addressed in the soundtrack, a French song of similar date. The song appears on
screen as a wave‐form that intensifies the link between image and sound, and makes
visible our own period and its technologies.
Stuart Pound has also recycled images from his own film and video work. A woman
from the past, much loved will appeal to anyone who shares his almost fetishistic
love for film stock. Frames from a 16mm black and white film are seen in low
magnification through a microscope connected to the computer. In fact it may be
the film rather than the woman, that is much loved. Grandmother is a Crab, shown
recently in Saison Vidéo, was made with poet Rosemary Norman. It borrows from an
earlier digital video which itself used footage captured from a travel advertisement
on television. Black and white, and mirror effects, take the image out of time giving it
both vividness and distance. The music is played in reverse. And the voice‐over and
under‐titles are a poem that re‐enters the magic world of a child on a beach.
Stuart Pound has a background in film and computing, brought together by the
arrival of digital video. He was born in 1944 in London and continues to live and
work there.