Extra Copies: Jason File and Tatiana Leshkina / Private View Thursday 24 March / 6.30 – 8.30pm

 

Tatiana Leshkina (b.1990 Moscow, Russia) studied at Gerasimov Institute of Cinematography and is an undergraduate student at the Chelsea College of Art and Design. Through film, photography and text she deals with complexities of representations, raising questions of authorship, exposing vagaries of memory and perception and examination of the pull of the popular culture, constructing self-destructive systems or mechanisms which can only lead to towards the multiplicity of meanings, a series of contradictory interpretations. She doesn’t wish to control an experience but rather attempts to set up a system that brings a set of questions to the viewer. In ‘Extras’ she uses found film footage to break apart and re-form, reconfigure and reconstruct the data image world, capturing moments in between interactions, a blank spot in our memory, moments without connection. Presenting data and without resolution, to question and not to conclude, a few words that can arouse a myriad of pictures and perceptions.

Jason File (b. 1976 Marquette, Michigan) is a graduate of Yale and Oxford, and a part-time student at the Chelsea College of Art & Design.  His work addresses questions of social and institutional authority and credibility, societal and contextual role-playing, and notions of originality and authenticity.   Here, he presents two pieces that query the basis for assertions of “original work” as well as the clues we use to identify work as such.   “Truth/Copy” uses a tool of the legal trade – a document certification stamp – to authenticate as “true” successive copies of a blank page, literally creating something from nothing.  Meanwhile, “Untitled (Copy)” presents two identical gallery information tags, each referring to the other as the copy, creating an endless loop of assertions of originality and derivativeness while simultaneously questioning the extent to which gallery and museum-supplied information can “become” part of a work.