24.11.2009
Picture This Atelier Space
Mardyke Ferry Road, Spike Island, Bristol BS1 6UU

Free admission

26 November-5 December 2009
6.30-8.30pm

An informal evening with the artist Ben Rivers who will discuss the ideas behind his two films Origin of the Species and new work Slow Action.

The two films will be screened during the evening providing an opportunity to see an element of his new four screen work, Slow Action, co-commissioned by Picture This and Animate Projects, which is currently in production.

Drinks and snacks provided.

The two films by artist Ben Rivers which muse on the ideas of Charles Darwin - one through the field of island bio-geography, considering possible future Utopias evolving on isolated islands, the other through the thoughts of a 75-year-old amateur inventor and Darwin enthusiast.

Picture This presents the first opportunity to see an element from a new four-screen work currently in production. Slow Action focuses on the relationship we have - and may have in the future - to islands. Ben Rivers' investigation considers the possible future Utopias evolving on isolated islands.

Exquisitely beautiful, poetic and serene, yet exact and rigorous in composition and timing, Origin of the Species is a tentative, fleeting portrait of a man about whom we are told little but learn much: a man of inventions, of science, of solitude; and to whom Darwin's On the Origin of Species is evidently dear. The world is seen as simultaneously familiar and alien; full of wonder and composed of a palette of dream-colours, alternately rich and colour-saturated and steely or tawny.

Origin of the Species was commissioned by Film London Artists Moving Image Network.

Slow Action has been commissioned by Picture This and Animate Projects. Supported by Bristol City Council and the British Council.