Scotiabank Nuit Blanche

Zone A Exhibition Project

Lighthouse, 2011

Suitable for all ages

In association with Galerie Lelong

Lighthouse, 2011

Catherine Yass - London, UK

Film Installation

In this recent film from leading contemporary artist Catherine Yass, a camera is used to capture the Royal Sovereign lighthouse—a unique structure located five miles out to sea in the English Channel. Yass is compelled by the precariousness of the unoccupied lighthouse, balanced on the corner of a square platform, which is in turn balanced on a single concrete post. The resulting 12-minute, 42-second film blends documentary and aesthetic approaches, visually interrogating the singular form from all perspectives – by helicopter, boat and diving team.

The high production quality and cinematography of Lighthouse renders the architecture of the lighthouse as if it were a sculptural object – a suspended structure encountered as you enter TIFF Bell Lightbox and from above, producing fragmented, unfamiliar vantage points in ways that complement the suspension and disorientation created by the camera as it moves around the platform and into the sea. 

Yass explores the relationship of built spaces and imagination. At the edge of the zone, the interplay of the uncanny architecture and reverie of Lighthouse’s abandoned structure adds to the broader poetics of space evolving over the evening, a reminder of the fluidity within the city’s landscape.

Film may induce Vertigo.

London-based artist Catherine Yass trained at the Slade School of Art, London, the Hochschüle der Künste, Berlin, and Goldsmiths College, London. Recent exhibitions include a retrospective at De La Warr Pavilion, UK, 2011; High Wire, 2008, Artangel and Glasgow International Festival; Descent, St. Louis Art Museum, MO, 2009; and The China Series (Stedelijk-Hertogenbosch Museum, Netherlands). In 2002 Yass was shortlisted for The Turner Prize. She is represented by Galerie Lelong and Alison Jacques Gallery.

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TIFF Bell Lightbox, 330 King Street West

This project is indoors.