Claire Hope, Adam Chodzko and Stuart Croft on Tank TV, 15th to 31st January 2009

This is an interesting collection of artist's moving image works at the online gallery, Tank TV. The main focus of the current exhibition is Claire Hope's work, and there are additional films by Chodzko and Croft.

"Complex Financial Instruments (Part 1)" explores the emotive combination of images of buildings in the process of being built or altered, with a buisness meeting discussion about a proposed new development.

Hope explores the buisiness aesthetic in her films, and "Complex Financial Instruments (part 2)" exposes the structure and fabrication of part 1. She also examines the corporate aesthetic and how these two aesthetics structure people's belief systems.

Hope's work hints at the dialogue between the rationality of buisiness and corporatism and the personal, and sometimes irrational, interpretation of space and nature.

In her solitary exploration of a landscaped garden, in "In All Honesty There's Nothing I'd Like More", the garden, with its stone steps, becomes a space for poetic negotiation as she enacts a dialogue between someone giving advice, perhaps a business person, and another 'character' who doesn't understand what she has to do to obtain important information. The internal dialogue has hints of psychosis, as the camera repeatedly traverses the garden, while on the sound track, Hope sings and finally laughs between giving serious advice and criticism. After all, this garden is a public space, and a public body, symbolically, which is made private by this internal dialogue. It is as though, it is possible to make a public space private, reversing the usual media language of making a private space public, as in "Shredder Heaven".

In "Your Task Will Fail To Be Realised (I'll Do What I Can)", Hope makes the public corporate space into a personalised one, as again she plays out a dialogue between corporate methods and a personal interpretation of the moment and the space. What is she doing there? Does she work there? Is she a client? What is her relationship to the man behind the camera? He watches intently for what she will do, and follows her around. He is complicit in terms of documenting her as she makes the space unfold into a personalised environment, one that she seems quite at home in. Hope spells out a message, which is reminiscent of the contestant Anna in Big Brother (UK), who spelt out a message to the viewing public with matches on the kitchen table. In this way, perhaps the viewer is addressed too, with the suggestion of magic and madness.

There are two other films, whch are related, "Around" by Adam Chodzko, and "Point X" by Stuart Croft.

Tank TV you can access these films in the archive, after the exhibition has finished.