membership / artist member

Michael Cousin

http://www.michaelcousin.co.uk
download cv here

biography

Michael Cousin is a moving image artist based in Wales, UK. Michael is the Founder and curator of Outcasting an online moving image gallery and is currently Freelance Curator at g39 in Cardiff. He is represented by Mermaid & Monster, Cardiff.

statement

Redux
The term has been adopted by film-makers to denote a new interpretation of an existing work by the restoration of previously removed material.

Anti-Redux
The term has been adopted by film-makers to denote a new interpretation of an existing work by destruction or removal of previously canonical material.

Redux-Plus
The term has been adopted by film-makers to denote a new interpretation of an existing work by the introduction of previously unrelated material.

"If Noam Chomsky had been a film-maker rather than a linguist, is this what he might be making? Michael Cousin makes short thought-provoking films that re-affirm the time honoured difficulties of dealing with ‘time’. Often presenting two completely different sets of footage side-by-side, one is drawn to the peculiarities that emerge in the ‘non visible’ space between them.

Broadly dealing with the the idea of fiction in imagery, still or moving, in all its forms. A ‘proper’ post modernist polymath his on-going assessments of ‘iconic’ films in the public realm (eg. 9/11 and the JFK assassination) are some of the best examples of this sort of work being made in the UK at the moment.

His work hinges on the assumptions that we make when we think we know what we see and hear. Cousin’s natural domain lies at the visual end of what used to be called the ‘mass media’, at a time when magazine photography, tape recording and cinefilm editing were genteel enough for anyone to be able to spot a fake. A moment in time for which the high water mark may well have been Kennedy’s assassination in 1968. A world filled with celluloid film, cow gum, Letraset, bromide prints and other, now redundant, tools at the disposal of the visual compositor.

Acutely aware of the frightening speed with which our new technologies have comprehensively muddied these waters, his films and sound pieces are valiant efforts to slow down that speed and get to what’s really there. What makes this unique is the way that our shared, and often unspoken, societal fears are orchestrated by him in this. Short and easy to look at, his works unfold in the mind to gradually become tight little Gourdian knots of conspiracy and counter-conspiracy.

After Kennedy’s assassination people often used to ask each other what they were doing when it happened. Cousin’s work affirms wholeheartedly that, in the future, after 9/11, people will be asking each other what they were looking at when it happened."
- Anders Pleass, Curator, Mostyn, Llandudno, 2012.