Ruth Legg

In the video piece ‘Centre Fold’ Legg probes and unravels the power of images to perform. A series of newspaper images are shown in extreme close-up, zoomed in to near abstraction, as a mechanical scan moves across image after image in a slow vertical or horizontal motion for a duration of over 20 minutes. Like in an endless cinematic tracking shot, the scan directs the gaze across the image; quite literally you ‘look’ the image ‘up and down’. The monotonous pace at which the scan moves in fact creates a certain form of suspense: since you can never see the image in its entirety, you are left in a constant state of expectation. Adding the details together, a recognizable picture may momentarily appear in front of your mind’s eye, yet only to fall apart again as the scan moves on and the image on the screen disintegrates again into a series of indefinable, changing abstractions.
As media images the job of newspaper photographs is to convey meaning, but when removed from their original context and dissolved into abstraction, they are no longer pressed into performing this service. Their power is still tangible, but only in a state of open potential. Consequently, the images begin to perform in their own right. Without a story or script to coerce them into delivering a message they still work, but the work they do now follows no prescribed function. It only elicits a gaze that travels on endlessly.