Mark Lewis: Galveston

London-based artist Mark Lewis (Canadian, born 1958 in Hamilton, Ontario) makes short, non-narrative films that closely consider the modern urban environment. Originally trained as a photographer, Lewis has worked with moving images since the mid-1990s, first using 35 mm film and, more recently, digital video as the medium for his visual meditations on time, movement, and space. 

His films are soundless, evoking a bygone era of silent film-making and heightening the work’s optical impact, while his closely choreographed, slowly gliding camerawork gives the effortless and improvisatory appearance of a single, continuous take. Such hybrid of film techniques and digital technologies renders Lewis’s work decidedly contemporary in that, as the artist explains, working in the digital realm is “a central part of the cinematic experience. The difference between the moving image and still image has dissolved. The uncanniness saves it from being a simulacrum of the real.”

Credit: Exhibition overview from museum website. More information is available at the above link.