(isn’t it said that in some cinematheque or other a piece of film is missing from a copy of ‘Battleship Potemkin’ - the scene with the baby’s pram, of course - it having been cut off and stolen lovingly like a lock of hair, a glove or an item of women’s underwear?)*

Having worked together during college on a project called ‘Leaving Things’, Dalby and Beasley now wish to develop this process further with the proposed exhibition ‘Stealing Pictures’. There is an ongoing and mutual fascination with the world of objects and a desire to reinvest in these vital relationships. The objects of everyday exchange hold the power to bring about all range of emotions and desires; to possess (to cherish), to give away (as gift or bribe), to sacrifice (the burning or tearing of the photo of the loved one), to lose (to be abandoned or oblivious) and to find (to be delighted or devastated).

Whereas ‘Leaving Things’ was concerned with loss, ‘Stealing Pictures’ proposes a more loving gesture; a more surrealist approach to the found object as intentional encounter (‘it found me ‘). Whereas Beasley intends to mark out the grey area between theft and gift with a series of photographs of objects which have been ‘stolen lovingly like a lock of hair’, Dalby takes only pictures. For Dalby, the taking of images is an attempt to resurrect a subject which is already absent or in ruins. Dalby intends to develop current investigations into a juxtaposing of, on the one hand, a more free, snapshot approach to the street/found-image-as-object, with, on the other, a more contrived, premeditated, private picture-collection. The search for order is an all too human desire. The artists hope to bring to light some of the paradoxes, small successes and disappointments inherent in such an aspiration by means of a collaborative approach to hanging and editing. Both artists deal with the possibility of a common-ground between the private collection and the public archive. Whereas Beasley has no idea what she is looking for (blind-love), Dalby knows precisely what it is that she has lost (mad-love).

We thus propose an exhibition for which we shall both work independently, collaborating closely only at the hanging stage in an attempt to bring our mutual curiosities together in the same spaces for a time, to layer together a multiplicity of ways of viewing, reading and identifying. Beasley works primarily with large b/w photographs, Dalby preferring to work with colour photography, producing images of various sizes. All work will be new, developed specifically for the proposed exhibition.

*Brecht indicated clearly that in epic theatre (which proceeds y successive tableaux) all the burden of meaning and pleasure bears on each scene, not on the whole. At the level of the play itself, there is no development, no maturation; there is indeed an ideal meaning (given straight in every tableaux), but there is no final meaning, nothing but a series of segmentations each of which possesses a sufficient demonstrative power. The same is true of Eisenstein: the film is a contiguity of episodes, each one absolutely meaningful, aesthetically perfect, and the result is a cinema by vocation anthological, itself holding out to the fetishist, with dotted lines, the piece for him  to cut out and take away to enjoy (isn’t it said that in some cinematheque or other a piece of film is missing from a copy of ‘Battleship Potemkin’ - the scene with the baby’s pram, of course - it having been cut off and stolen lovingly like a lock of hair, a glove or an item of women’s underwear?) The primary force of Eisenstein is due to the fact that no image is boring, you are not obliged to wait for the next in order to understand and be delighted; it is a question not of a dialectic (that time of patience required for certain pleasures)but of a continuous jubilation made up of a summation of perfect instants. (Roland barthes, from Diderot, Brecht, Eisenstein in Image Music Text)

Copyright Annabelle Dalby & Becky Beasley, 2004

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