undertow series

Undertow is an ongoing series of short videos, digital and photopolymer prints. The video works are all shot from under water looking up towards the sky during rainfall. The concern here is to capture the effects of light, shadow and natural sound at a particular place and point in time. There is no editing involved other than a change in speed, the videos are slowed down, and the duration is limited to two minutes.

The works can be seen as individual pieces or shown as a looped installation with multiple screens.

Undertow series 2014 from Mark Graver on Vimeo.

The related printed works are made by isolating stills from the videos and manipulating them into photopolymer and digital prints. The intention is to create a fluid installation work that uses elements of the different mediums to explore connections, similarities and differences between the moving, temporal and the still images.

A fourteen minute looped version containing the first seven videos in the series was created for the Combinations exhibition at the Centre for Contemporary Printmaking, Seacourt Print Workshop in Bangor, Northern Ireland (July 9th – August 1st 2014).

Curated by Mark Graver, Combinations is an exhibition exploring intermedial approaches to printmaking and is the first in a planned series of exhibitions and events to come under the RE:Print project umbrella.

Undertow Series 2014

The etchings in the Undertow series are derived from stills taken from the video series. Still frames are selected from the videos then manipulated in Photoshop and printed as acetates. These are then exposed onto photopolymer laminated aluminium plates using a UV light source, developed and then etched in a copper sulphate/salt mordant. The proportions of the plates reflect the same aspect ratio as HD video frames.