Death Watch (1980) is a film by Bertrand Tavernier, filmed in Glasgow and the west coast of Scotland. The film uses the decrepit, pre-gentrified state of my home city to signal a future in decline, two years before Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner would ‘invent’ the post-modern cityscape. In Death Watch, Katherine Mortenhoe (Romy Schneider) is…

Teeth (2:19 mins) inserts the artist, literally and amusingly, into the Blade Runner world. The video is an edit of a sequence in Blade Runner during which the female lead and love interest, Rachael (Sean Young), watches Deckard (Harrison Ford) get cleaned up after a fight. This section of the film is important as it…

Repeated viewing of films and the possibilities of delay, pause and reflection afforded by digital viewing offer Laura Mulvey’s possessive spectator the opportunity to hold onto favourite moments, fragmented from linear narrative. Mulvey claims that ‘In this delayed cinema the spectator finds a heightened relation to the human body, particularly to the star’. While it…

Ostensibly about the interrogation of a hardly noticeable prop detail in Blade Runner (Ridley Scott, 1982), Vicki and Alex, Like the Clouds: Final Edit is a conversation between cyber folk and a study of a heteronormative pose, of holding and ownership.

Between the now lost Vicki and Alex, Like the Clouds: Couples Edit (2014) and the Final Edit (2015) came this. Vicki and Alex, Like the Clouds: Melissa Edit is named for and stars the screenwriter Melissa Mathison (1950 – 2015).

“The best Blade Runner sequel is Peter by Jane Topping.” Matt M. Lloyd, Glasgow Short Film Festival, 2017. Peter (Dir. Jane Topping, 2014) re-frames what is considered a classic of dystopian cinema (Blade Runner, 1982, dir. Ridley Scott) with the intention of positioning the artist within the text and so implying that such radical gestures…

I made the film Outside Bleak House (13:22) for this show. It’s about spending a summer avoiding reading Dickens’ Bleak House for an exhibition. I worked the film into some artist pages in Kate Briggs’s and Lucrezia Russo’s book, The Nabokov Paper. Thank you Kate, Lucrezia, Prof. Robert Williams, Nick & Simon of information as material and…

Jane Topping’s solo exhibition The Women references paranoid gothic texts, costume and gender definition to interrogate the power play of relationships. Topping uses repetition and mirroring to highlight the anxiousness that accompanies looking and being looked at. Duty and desire, devotion and decadence are revealed in The Women through a collection of screenprints, collages, drawings…

Part of this series of works was the 30 minute video Darklight (2011) made to time for this 30 minute show at Nomi’s Kitchen which I reworked to be a good chunk of Pist Protta Issue 71. You can watch a super-low res version here, though I doubt it was much more resolved at the…

A solo show at Glasgow Project Room. Witchcraft, broken hearts and bloody revenge, 2010. Argento approved.