Split Screen

Leslie Bauer
Gwendolyn Audrey Foster
Todd Lambeth
Kate Shults

January 27 to February 25, 2023

Split Screen is an experiment in encouraging language and conversation between 2D (in this case painting) and media artworks while expanding experiential possibilities for viewers. Less a situation of work coexisting alongside other work in aid of a specific set of ideas, appositions or overarching theme, the exhibition loosely harnesses syncopations—visual, audial, kinetic—to imagine a larger composition within which infinite possibilities for comprehension exist and from which infinite numbers of questions arise, much like abstraction itself. 

In Leslie Bauer’s Fahren 7 velocity deforms our understanding of static objects, effecting surfaces into recondite dynamic shapes. “Traffic, as something very essential and characteristic of a particular time, is presented as a pattern of order and a perceptible form of structuring space and time. Locomotion makes a holistic view impossible. In the state of movement, speed and distance determine the perception of the landscape traversed. The road network itself is a pattern, a space-rastering construct, which in turn offers a reservoir of patterns, images and narratives." 

Gwendolyn Audrey Foster’s film Dada Ship wrests itself away from the homogeneity of the historical movement to set sail for other, queerer shores employing disrupted stereoscopy and collaged détournement of archival imagery. 

In his paintings, Todd Lambeth has long been interested in optically challenging unfixed areas of interest by flipping figure and ground. Like the moving image artists in Split Screen, Lambeth understands the actions of fracturing, splicing and splitting in order to animate lacunae between seeing and recognition, between “this” and “that.” 

Kate Shults has created a video portrait of a disaster—2017’s Hurricane Irma—from the precarious safety of her home in inland Central Florida. Through anticipation, impact and aftermath, Irma explores the fragility of digital images and landscapes while deftly challenging the politics of looking.

While the artists in Split Screen engage with varying approaches and concerns, they often utilize similar techniques and processes—layering, montage, chroma shifting and hybrid analog/digital workflows—to enrich the vocabulary of contemporary abstraction across disparate media.

Leslie Bauer is a visual artist living and working in Frankfurt and Paris. She is co-founder of Filmclub FFM and Bauer Verlag.

Gwendolyn Audrey Foster makes highly personal poetic abstract films in 8mm and 16mm, and also films made from found 35mm film and HD video. She works in handpainted filmmaking and direct cinema as well as other film and video techniques. Foster's award-winning films and videos have screened at Museum of Modern Art (NY), Anthology Film Archives (NY), Black Maria Film Festival, Rencontres (Marseille), as well as many other notable galleries, film festivals and museums around the world and are held in the UCLA Film Archive. Author of Experimental Cinema: The Film Reader and director of The Women Who Made the Movies, Foster is Willa Cather Professor Emerita in Film Studies.

Todd Lambeth lives and works in Victoria, Canada, which is located on the traditional territories of the Lək̓ʷəŋən-speaking peoples and the Songhees, Esquimalt and W̱SÁNEĆ First Nations. Lambeth studied Visual Art at the Ontario College of Art and Design and received his MFA in Studio Art from the University of Victoria where he currently teaches drawing and painting. He is a serial-based artist who combines manual and digital techniques in his work and is influenced by optical illusion illustrations, graphic design and hard-edged modernist painting. Lambeth’s work expresses the artist’s interest in vision and perceptions of colour and pictorial space. His work has been exhibited across Canada in commercial galleries and artist-run centres. In recent years, he has participated in exhibitions at Gallery Jones (Vancouver), Winchester Galleries (Victoria), Deluge Contemporary Art, Penticton Art Gallery, Open Space (Victoria) and Chernoff Fine Art (Vancouver).

Kate Shults is a Florida-based video artist, splitting her interests between abstract, experimental work and microbudget, narrative films. Her videos primarily reflect her interests in the wild, weird landscapes of Florida, the textures of digital images and the use of obsolete video technology. Kate is currently an Associate Lecturer at the University of Central Florida in Orlando, where she also programs film for various local festivals and organizations.