M a r k   L e w i s

b. 1957, Hamilton, Canada
Lives and works in London, UK

Mark Lewis Children's Games, Heygate Estate 2002 35mm film transferred to DVD, projected, 7:23 minutes Co-commissioned by Film and Video Umbrella and Cornerhouse, Manchester in association with the Centro de Arte de Salamanca and Rooseum, Malmo. With support of the Culture 2000 programme of the European Union. Courtesy of the artist and Galerie Cent8, Paris

In Mark Lewis’ reflexive practice, the formal inventions, narrative, technical and temporal devices of filmmaking are quietly isolated and examined, allowing each of his films to reverberate against the history of cinema in an ongoing reappraisal of its methods of presentation and its language. This critical engagement is underscored by the work’s extremely high production values, due in part to Lewis’ practice of working only with 35mm film, and using professional casts, film crews and editing facilities on every project. The films Tenement Yard, Heygate Estate and Children’s Games, Heygate Estate (both 2002) combine Lewis’ familiar examination of the visual techniques of film (in this case, camera viewpoints) with a study of the spaces of modernist architecture, illuminating through this coupling the codes and strictures of each system. Heygate Estate is a sprawling high-rise housing project built in the early 1960’s, once-over a model of modernist urban planning in post-war Britain, now slated for demolition. Each film engages this environment using a single camera technique; in Tenement Yard, the camera’s line of sight is fixed, while Children’s Games employs an uninterrupted travelling shot. The rational spaces and monolithic tower blocks of the estate dominate the frame in both films, although as Tenement Yard emphasizes the small details – and relative scale – of human habitation, like laundry billowing on a line strung between windows or the ant-like movements of children playing football on a patch of turf, a different sense of the same environment is conveyed by Children’s Games. The camera glides along a raised walkway that traverses the interstitial zones between buildings, presenting the same, fixed gaze to every vista. The spaces become vertignous as each view is succeeded by another, similar view; around every corner is another corner, ramps and branching walkways, more of the same buildings. The viewer, like the residents who are relegated to the periphery of the frame, gets lost. In the delicate interplay of architecture and the semantics of film, the Heygate films draw out the implications of each as public systems of representation.

Selected Solo Exhibitions
2003 Mark Lewis Rooseum, Malmö, Sweden. 2002 Cornerhouse, Manchester, UK. Centro de Arte, Salamanca, Spain. Kunsthalle Bern, Switzerland. 2001 Villa Arson, Nice. Museum of Modern Art, Oxford, UK. Or Gallery, Vancouver, Canada. 2000 National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa, Canada Musée d'Art Moderne et Contemporain, Geneva, Switzerland. Norwich Gallery, Norwich, UK. Site Gallery, Sheffield, UK. 1999 INOVA (Institute Of Visual Arts), University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee, WI.

Selected Group Exhibitions
2003 Re-makes, CAPC Musée d'Art Contemporain, Bordeaux, France. (Based upon) True stories, Witte de With, Rotterdam, The Netherlands. 2002 Liverpool Biennial, Tate Liverpool, UK. Gwangju Bienniale, Gwangju, Korea. Cine y casi cine, Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid, Spain. Non-places, Frankfürter Kunstverein, Frankfurt,Germany. Spectator Sport, Cornerhouse, Manchester, UK. 2001 Endtroducing, Villa Arson, Nice, France. 2000 Intelligence: New British Art, Tate Britain, London, UK. Wouldn’t it be Nice, Montevideo Time Based Arts/Netherlands Media Institute, Amsterdam, The Netherlands. 3^rd Taipei Biennial of Contemporary Art, Museum of Fine Art, Taipei, Taiwan. 1999 Cinema Cinema, Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven, The Netherlands. Film - Reflexion in der Kunst, Galerie für Zeitgenössische Kunst, Leipzig, Germany. 1998 Program for Art on Film, Brooklyn Museum, New York, NY. 1997 Tampering with the Reel, Artists Space, New York, NY. Rotterdam International Film Festival, Rotterdam, The Netherlands. One Minute Scenario, Printemps de Cahors, Cahors, France.

Further Reading
Bode, Steven, David Turnbull & Jean-Pierre Rehm, Mark Lewis (Film & Video Umbrella, London, UK; Villa Arson, Nice, France; Musuem of Modern Art, Oxford, UK, 2002)
Bode, Steven, ed., Mark Lewis Films 1995-2000 (Film & Video Umbrella, London; National Gallery of
Canada, Ottawa, Canada; INOVA, University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee, WI, 2000)
Durden, Mark, "Mark Lewis: Site Gallery," Art Monthly no.235 (Apr. 2000): 26-27
Lewis, Mark & Jeff Wall, “Mark Lewis in conversation with Jeff Wall,” Transcripts vol. 3, issue 3 (1999): 167-97
Lubbock, Tom, "No Particular Place to Go," The Independent, Apr. 3, 2001: http://enjoyment.independent.co.uk/film/features/story.jsp?story=64381
Sans, Jerome, "Trying not to make films that are too long: a conversation between Jerome Sans and Mark Lewis," Trans Magazine no.7 (2000): 206-13
Yood, James, "Mark Lewis: Rhona Hoffman Gallery," Artforum International v.39 no.9 (May, 2001): 180-81
Zdanovics, Olga, “Mark Lewis,” New Art Examiner v.28 no.8/9 (May-Jun. 2001): 90-91

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