‘Treading Water’, 2024, Richard Ducker
press release:
‘Treading Water’, 2024, is a film about being in Dalston over one day. Filmed during the summer of 2023, it represents how we now experience the world on our devices while capturing the sense of place of a particular neighbourhood of London. The screen is partitioned into 9 boxes, each showing a separate film simultaneously: four are of slow, still, constructed views, in the style of a Dutch genre painting, while the other five are of incidental everyday moments shot furtively on a mobile phone. This is then presented in the grid format of a CCTV monitor.
The juxtapositions within the grid suggest an oscillation between bored reverie, the curiosity of the flaneur, and the solitude of voyeurism. The eye looks in vain for narrative, rather the narrative, such as it is, and is established by the soundtrack, which takes the viewer on a walk through the neighbourhood. Although the audio at times feels hectic it is arrested by the stillness of the images. The soundtrack then acts as an anchor binding the visuals together, structuring the piece in a contextual acoustic framework.
This ode to reverie is interrupted by two small ink drawings, Dark Matter, 2012. The drawings are a means of confronting the horror of the contemporary. The images are taken from the daily cycle of newsreel uploads and are of the plumes of smoke from war zone bombings. Rather than trying to represent horror with horror, the scale is deliberately small (postcard or mobile phone dimensions), as a means of reducing its excess of horror to psychologically manageable pocket size, while the digital image of convenience is made analogue. It is a different window onto another world separated by geographical distance from the banality of the film, a distance that is collapsed by the digital screen.
These elements are then brought together as a café within a café. An apparently welcoming, intimate space of house plants, table and chairs. A place to drink coffee and watch the world go by on a CCTV screen.
IMAGES BELOW FROM INSTALLATION AT FINCH CAFE
They Come, They Sit, They Go: ‘Treading Water’ 14 February - 14 March 2026
