CORINNA SPENCER
Sunday, February 21, 2010
COSMOGRAPHIA
Steve Richards and Rachel Cattle's latest film Cosmographia, takes its title from a 16th century encyclopaedic record of the known and imagined worlds by the cartographer Sebastian Munster.(Transition)
Richards and Cattle's Cosmographia is a journey through a maze of repeated and abstracted patterns and shapes exploring ideas of eternal recurrence and the hermetic/esoteric principle 'as above, so below'.The film has a hand built and drawn aesthetic, an operatic soundtrack and uses motifs that occur throughout Kubrick's The Shining. Other eclectic influences come from the likes of Buckminster Fuller, P.D. Ouspensky and the films of Kenneth Anger.(Transition)
Waves of sadness with senses heightened by the music and darkness: Cosmographia's hand drawn element provided an intimacy supported by the gallery set up of darkness and floor cushions that continued the motif from within the film. Repetition of the abstract with breaks of the recognisable yet slightly disturbing, pull us into a parallel reality.
The feel here is of the naive and handmade but in its repetition, mirroring and flashes of a (constructed) real world, I found this film twisted with a haunting madness. This collaboration detail their cultural/Art historical and contemporary references (see Transition website). But the strongest theme I took from it was of the face to face with the interior and the 'no escape' from torturous repetition.
Photography by Corinna Spencer
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