Girl on Fire
Tony Lawrence
Found footage, HD video, color, sound, digital projector, screen, 2 minutes
Australia 2010
"The found-footage work Girl on Fire by the Australian artist and filmmaker Tony Lawrence shows a girl performing an underwater dance of sorts. Storing the filmstock in a damp place has caused Redux damage, which occurs only on black-and-white film and manifests as rust-colored corrosion spots on the film material. As though by chance, the damage is almost exclusively limited to the girl's figure, making it seem like she has burst into flames. Adhering to a bizarre poetics of coincidence, the changes to the emulsion layer have coated the film's motif with another layer of meaning, inverting the visual information – a girl underwater – into the symbolic opposite – a girl in flames." (From the catalog of the exhibition Analog_Digital. Media Exchanges, curated by Eva Fischer and Anna Högner, METRO Kinokulturhaus, October 3, 2017 – January, 28 2018, Vienna, Austria.)
Tony Lawrence, born 1961 in Sydney, lives and works in Sydney.
