Press coverage

Womens Art, May - June 1993

Art Monthly, May 1993:
"Physically manipulated by the very nature of the place, the obscuring screen, the lighted gangways, and the evidence, visual and aural, that something is going on, the audience is led towards the very point from which a cinema film would normally be projected. What holds us is the acknowledgement that what we are witnessing is a rudimentary narrative structure that shadows the cinema’s current status – an emptied-out vessel with leavings – and which is reanimated and enlivened by renewed imaginative engagement. In some ways, what one is looking at is not very much at all. But, should one care to accept it, what is on offer is much more." (Michael Archer)

Womens Art, May - June 1993:
"Time lapses without us being consciously aware, reflecting the spectators as they would have sunk into a film. The liquid condenses as the point of the building's dereliction compacts its own emotive history into one capsule of time. Counsel makes a complex reference to this history through the projection, representing a continuous series of perpetual presents.

"[...] Counsell's work has a maturity which surpasses much contemporary installation work, where concepts become lost in the environment and meanings are muddled or over-worked, sledgehammer-style. She instead works specifically with the dynamics of the site. A young artist, she has opened herself to the increase of fast, shiny media language, art which addresses a mish-mash of cultures, signs and symbols, out of which have been born more global codes of understanding. Her current work addresses a much wider context of human mood and emotion. one which reaches further than the site-specifity of the project." (Caroline Smith)

Creative Cinema, June - July 1993:
"It left one to contemplate the Deco features of the building and other members of the audience and served as a reminder of an extended experience of time in relation to entropy and decay. The inaccessible space behind the glass screen provided series of devices – the ability to imagine and surmise about audiences of the past; the desire to be part of changing over the reels, a wish to engage more directly with the work and the building; the frustration and seduction of the unseen." (Helen Sloan)
 
The Independent Magazine, 10 April 1993:
“The grainy black-and-white image of an aperitif glass, placed against a blank ground, one-quarter-full of a dark fluid, filled the screen. And that was all. Nothing moving. Nothing changing. It was clearly a cinefilm - but it seemed to be a cine film of a still photo.

“[…] It was like the experience of being in a cinema before the show starts, and you keep thinking the lights are dimming, but they're not. By this stage the fluid-question had become totally absorbing; the interaction between spectator and screen was, whatever else, unquestionably intense. Again, we asked the usher. He told us, wait. The film would end, be re-wound, start again from the beginning. Then we could draw our own conclusions.” (Rob Legg)