Transformation #1

Introducing ‘Transformation #1’ Grey Area presents a dark and intriguing world inspired by the film Blade Runner. Samuel Levack and Jennifer Lewandowski have created a series of 10 works which condense and reconfigure Ridley Scott's world of 2019. Transformation #1 offers an assemblage of iconic elements from Blade Runner including stark neon, fractured glass, stuffed replicant animals, exquisite corpses, a collision of eastern ephemera, plastic sheeting and advanced but clunky technology. Blade Runner's brutal vision of the future is encapsulated by swathes of soft unnatural light and deep dark contrast. The fractured imagery is mirrored by broken glass and inverted symbolism, the disorientation of neon made back to front and upside down, umbrellas and parasols hung from the ceiling but appearing righted deep beneath the floor, and the incomplete toys that are J F Sebastian's friends, the automaton of a more advanced age. Samuel Levack and Jennifer Lewandowski are an artist duo that like to play with the iconic; the relationship between people and the stuff that surrounds us. The geography of media and our changing relationship with place and time. It is our relationship with an iconic movie that actually effects the world that follows, at times we seem keen to try and avoid becoming too much like science fiction's apparent prophecy and yet in other areas there is a certain inevitability that the movies have it spot on. Unlike much science fiction Blade Runner is looking more and more like a feasible evolution of the western world, a cut-up, a collage of the west, the east, the future and the past, as the tagline of the 1982 film states Man Has Made His Match... Now It's His Problem. The anachronistic and contradictory world where east meets west, tradition meets technology and lowlifes suffer vertigo are all stacked up in this series of works by Samuel Levack and Jennifer Lewandowski. Their reinvention of Scott's pre-vision typifies their approach to media as they draw homage and reflection on an enduringly iconic moment in film and on the way we remember films as crystallised snapshots. The whole film is rearticulated and condensed into 10 ‘frames’ taken from their re-imagined, reconstructed collection of ephemera.

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