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Having practiced making work for 50 years a question arises, which is: "how does a personal history - with its embracing of behaviours in my case as diverse as creating sound art installations, making documentaries for Television, running an academic research centre on the future of the moving image and shooting promos for well known music acts - how has that diversity of production informed my work in the past and much more specifically, right now? During my life each practice has always informed the one that is running parallel (or is to come). You can't edit a documentary without learning about the efficacious organisation of information and discovering how to reveal that information whilst drawing your audience along with you - and then working with installation form and understanding that you're doing pretty much the same thing - albeit on the surface, they may seem entirely different. People need enter an installation space and be interested in what they see and hear, feeling that the mind guiding that entry also will take care of them whilst being in that space, such that they receive a sense that there is something to be gained by being there - as well as trust that more will be revealed in a series of stages. - and when the basic point of the work has been transmitted, then it's time to leave.
This is very similar to documentary which is the curation of the audiences attention - though the state you try to bring the audience to is qualitatively and aesthetically different - the mechanics you use to operate the functionalities of how an installation operates on the audience goes back to Greek theatre, or further if you like, to making the fire for people in a cave to throw their shadows on a wall. For myself, on becoming 70, I look forward to becoming free of self mainly because the best audience responses I've received was when I was 'just' making the work, where I'd learned all the five finger exercises sufficient to relax my 'self' so that 'the work made itself' ... Hokusai, on becoming 70 said: "Nothing I did before the age of seventy was worthy of attention. At seventy-three, I began to grasp the structures of birds and beasts, insects and fish, and of the way plants grow. If I go on trying, I will surely understand them still better by the time I am eighty-six, so that by ninety I will have penetrated to their essential nature. At one hundred, I may well have a positively divine understanding of them, while at one hundred and thirty, forty, or more I will have reached the stage where every dot and every stroke I paint will be alive. May Heaven, that grants long life, give me the chance to prove that this is no lie.” 
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2025 and beyond...
1: Vida 1976 - 1981
2: Transition 1981 - 1982 3: Triple Vision/Videomakers 1982 - 1985 4: Triple Vision & Channel 4 1985 - 1992 5: A Trip Sideways to the BBC 1988 - 1990 6: Cinematography & Scripts 1992 - 2006 7 Academia 2007 - 2016 8. CineFest 2015 - 2016 9. Sedition Art 2015 - 2023 10. Makersplace & NFT's 2019 - 2022 11. 2025 and Beyond? I like irony - so here is one of my first works reinvented and I hope to release this on Sedition Art in 2025 - that'll be 48 years after the original piece was made in 1977. BELOW Presentiments II
Exhibitions & Releases in 2024:
- United Kingdom, Bristol, RWA Open, November, Testing to Destruction, September 2024 - January 2025 - Sedition International Online Release, Transitions, November 2024 - Sedition International Online Release, Life on Mars, October 2024 - Italy Palazzo Albrizzi-Capello Venice, Anima Mundi, Exhibition titled Visions, A Sad and Divine Comedy, May - Italy Palazzo Albrizzi-Capello Venice, Anima Mundi, Exhibition titled Consciousness, Hearts of Oak, April - Italy Palazzo Albrizzi-Capello Venice, Anima Mundi, Exhibition titled Rituals, Un Tempo Una Volta (Once Upon a Time in Venice) March - Sedition International Online Release, Un Tempo Una Volta, Mexico: Landscapes of the Heart, Hearts of Oak, April 2024 - Germany, Berlin, Director’s Lounge, C.A.R Contemporary Art Ruhr, March 2024 - Germany, Berlin Paris Recontres, Haus der Kulturen der Welt March 2024 Between 2008 and 2023 Terry exhibited work in the China, USA, Australia, Ireland, Italy, Netherlands, Japan, Germany, Korea, Portugal, Iran, Turkey, Slovenia, Sweden, France, Norway, Malta, Madeira and the UK - some of these countries many times. A complete list of Exhibitions between 2008 and 2023 follows beneath the section on exhibitions beneath 1978 and 2007. |
Latest Retrospective - Bath October 2023:
Terry Flaxton: A Life in Video Art
CLICK HERE FOR AN OUTLINE
Roseberry Road Studios
From 6th October through to 5th November 2023
28 Roseberry Rd, Bath BA2 3DX
Terry Flaxton: A Life in Video Art
CLICK HERE FOR AN OUTLINE
Roseberry Road Studios
From 6th October through to 5th November 2023
28 Roseberry Rd, Bath BA2 3DX
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BELOW: Talking Heads 1977 - 1979 Tokyo Video Festival Prize Winner
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EXHIBITIONS Between 1978 onwards
In 1978, the Fashion show, (made in 1977) was exhibited at the Long Beach Museum by Kathy Rae Huffman, (curator of moving image work). Next came the Fourth Tokyo Video Festival where Flaxton, Cooper and Dedman's piece (written by Flaxton) Talking Heads, won a prize. From then on Flaxton's work was shown at many festivals, notably the Worldwide Video Festival in Den Haag, Netherlands, but many, many other places including Moscow, Tokyo, Algiers, San Francisco, Locarno, Montbeliard, Paris, Milan, Rome, Seoul, Amsterdam - and many other places around the world. In 1986 the British Film Institute as well as Channel 4 asked Flaxton to Shoot “Out off Order” the 3rd electronically produced and released on 35mm ‘film’ in history (after “Harlow” starring Ginger Rogers, 1965 and 200 Hotels, 1972). Though travelling as a cinematographer and occasionally exhibiting between 1992 and 1998 there was a hiatus in Flaxton's work between Zagorsk (1992 and Skin Deep (1999) Flaxton in fact worked on many artists pieces and brought a high level of lighting to many people's work. Having come across HD in 1990, between 2000 and 2007 Flaxton concentrated on HD as a developing production form and tested cameras for Panasonic and Sony and by 1999 he had shot an HD work in the US which was mastered as a 35mm output at Du Art Labs in New York - and from then on spoke at many seminars including the NFT to speak about the transition form Standard Definition (720 x 576 pixels) to the then low level HD Standards of 1280 x 720, the faux HD of 1440 x 1920 and finally the full 1920 x 1080 standard that we all know today (2023). So in eventually entering academia in 2007 with an AHRC Creative Research Fellowship - where the candidates charge was to discover how technical and creative innovations feed upon each other, Flaxton then began a second wave of production as an artist - where, having spent many years on moving camera cranes and dollies - Flaxton chose to use HD and the camera itself as a window, a portal on, not only the world - but importantly on the very thing that looks: the self. By 2015 Sedition Art had arrived and was a perfect fit for what Flaxton later called his 'Chamber Works’. Flaxton also began producing long form moving image artworks during this period characterised by “Myth and Meaning in the Digital Age” (began in 1992 and finished in 2018) , “To Sand and Stare: A Somerset Landscape” (2011 to 2018) and latterly “Mexico: Landscape of the Heart” (2023). |