Isabel's Piano

Isabel's Piano Screening and dicussion with Nicola Stephanie and Mary Wild 19 November 2014 7pm - doors open at 6.30pm A new film by Nicola Stephanie (British, born 1981), Isabel’s Piano (60 minutes) is a portrait of the artist’s uncle Steven. Furthering Stephanie’s exploration of body and space in relation to the camera, the film makes a quiet departure from conventional cinematic looking; its visual language emerges from a family relationship, rather than detached observation. Sited in and around Steven’s house, the film maps a passage of two years. During this time he is involved in the restoration of an antique grand piano inherited from his grandmother, Isabel. The instrument, taken apart into thousands of pieces, becomes the material and psychological landscape that Steven inhabits. The film accompanies him as he attempts to cope with the extraordinary complexity of the piano, originally made by perhaps a hundred factory workers in 1895. Isabel's Piano is a study of this self-reliant individuality, which exposes emotion and economics as influences on both Stephanie and Steven's choice of production methods. Stephanie takes a family member as a ready subject, as many artists have done in the past. Yet the film is unusual in its acceptance of the camera as a physical agent in the act of portraiture – the cinematography is haptic in its methods. Steven’s inventive experiments on the piano dictate the action, yet we experience his process entirely through Stephanie’s explorations - sometimes seeing her hands as they reach around to touch.
Admission
£10 £7 concessions/Member of the Freud Museum

Website
http://www.freud.org.uk/events/75701/isabels-piano/

Source: http://www.culture24.org.uk//se000274?id=EVENT501583