Caution Thin Ice
Tina Keane
5 October – 9 November 2013
Tina Keane is an internationally acclaimed artist who has worked since the 1970s in a wide variety of media, ranging from performance and installation to film, video, digital technologies and neon sculpture. An influential and consistently inventive artist, she is a leading exponent of media installation work who responds to a physical space and constructs her work around the use of light using video monitors and neon, “opening up a dialogue between the perceptions of the viewer and the work itself” (Art Monthly).
Keane’s work has been exhibited and screened both nationally and internationally, and she has won awards from the Arts Council, Channel 4, the British Council and London Production Board. She was Lecturer in Film & Video at Central St Martin’s College of Art from 1982-2012 where her students included Sandra Lahire and Isaac Julien. Keane was also a Research Fellow at St Martin’s over the past decade, focused on the internet and digital creativity.
The major publication on Keane’s work to date, Electronic Shadows, (Black Dog Publishing 2004), considered her significant role in contemporary video art and her place in artist’s film from the late 1970s onwards. It documented much of Keane’s work and noted her influence on various contemporary British artists.
This exhibition includes several of Keane’s works from the 1980s, including the dream-like Faded Wallpaper (1988) which explores visual perception, madness and the search for identity. Installation works with video and neon include Ghost Train (2002) a film that explores the space between two worlds, and Caution: Thin Ice from 1993-94, a subtly complex combination of neon wall-text, poem-etched glass table, and video monitor displaying a continually spinning skater. As the writer and curator Guy Brett wrote in an essay published by Luxonline: “a work by Tina Keane is a subtle intermingling of social issues, aesthetic pleasure, technical experimentation and structural organization, or form.”
Transposition, Keane’s major performative projection from 1999-2000, was re-performed and screened in Tate Tanks in October 2012, and her new short film, Beauty in Motion will be screened for the first time at the London Film Festival this month.