[update - there is a review article of this event at Realtime magazine here.]

Teaching and Learning Cinema presents:
MIKE LEGGETT: expanded screen, performed film, structural film 1970-1981
Saturday 28 April 6.30pm-10pm

[view installations of Unword and Vistasound from 6pm-730pm, film screenings from 730pm-9.30pm]

Australian Centre for Photography (ACP)
257 Oxford Street, Paddington NSW 2021
T: 02 9332 1455
F: 02 9332 6104

The TLC continues its work drawing out the primary sources in artists’ film in Australia with an evening with Mike Leggett. Linking Sydney to the heady days of seventies London where he was a founding member of the London Filmmakers’ Co-op, this event explores Leggett’s 1970s structural films, his 1980s media-performance works and his ongoing interactive art research in Sydney.

More Information: louise[at]teachingandlearningcinema[dot]org

read below for full info…

IMAGE © Mike Leggett Sheepman & the Sheared (part 6) ‘Red+Green+Blue’

MIKE LEGGETT: expanded screen, performed film, structural film 1970-1981

Sydney’s Teaching and Learning Cinema will present some film and video works by Sydney-based British born artist Mike Leggett.

Mike Leggett has been making art with film and video since the early 70s. He was a foundation member of the London Filmmakers’ Co-op Workshop, established in 1969. The film labs in the workshop were the platform for key creative output of its era, Mike’s early films using the Workshop labs to explore the physical parameters of film, foregrounding their structure within a system of representation. Included in the program is his seminal 1971 work Shepherd’s Bush.

Mike collaborated and taught with intermedia artist Ian Breakwell in the early days of performance art in Britain. In 1970, Mike and Ian made Unword, a film based on a series of performances. It was not until 2003 that Mike and Ian realised the work in its intended form – cost limitations made finishing it impossible at the time, yet easily done in 2003 with contemporary technology. A startling black and white energy-filled evocation, Unword is in the collection of the Henry Moore Institute, Leeds City Museum and will receive its Australian premiere at the ACP.

Two films in the program, Erota/Afini (1973) and Vistasound (1981), use a rigorous metrical image structure to investigate the scope of readings of cinematic images. Erota/Afini comes to us from the Lux archive in London and its screening involves a `performance for projectionist’ . Vistasound (in a never-before- seen 3-screen version), will be installed in the ACP galleries between 6pm and 7.30pm. Also on the bill is the Standard 8 1968 work Three Women of Bristol, a film thought long lost, re-discovered in 2006.

We are very pleased to be able to present Mike’s film-performance- lecture Image Con Text, as it resonates strongly with the aims of the Teaching and Learning Cinema: that watching films should be a discursive activity – cinema should not merely be passive consumption of moving images.

Mike moved to Australia from the UK in 1988. Through the 90s, he has applied the structural approach of his early film work to digital technology. In 1996 he curated a major exhibition on artists’ CD-roms for the MCA (Burning the Interface ). In 1999 he developed the interactive multimedia prototype Pathscape. He is completing a PhD in the Creativity and Cognition Studios at UTS, investigating how the power of visual memory can be used to link moving images.