Elaine Shemilt

Jim Moir (aka Vic Reeves) explores Video Art, revealing how different generations ‘hacked’ the tools of television to pioneer new ways of creating art that can be beautiful, bewildering and wildly experimental.

This is a single-channel version of the installation Chimera first exhibited at the Society of Scottish Artists, Annual Exhibition, Royal Academy Building, Edinburgh, 1998. It is the first manifestation of a collaborative programme initiated in 1997 between the two artists, bringing together experience and ideas from still and moving image-making.

Doppelgänger is a video performance in which Shemilt manipulates her body and her image into creating a phantasmal double of herself.

"This film was made in an effort to illustrate briefly the parody of life as a series of conflicts. For example the initial conflict between innocence and social convention, as seen in the confusion of a child. I have tried to project the subconscious conflict-contradiction-of life and inevitable death. Thus the film is in two movements as it were. In the first, a figure dressed in white to symbolise life, moves through and explores a series of structures and objects. In the second movement the figure is replaced by a figure in black, who wanders back through the wreckage of the structures. As death, she controls life until they write into nothingness." - Elaine Shemilt

A 16 mm film shot in three sequences. First exhibited at Winchester School of Art in 1976, then at the New Contemporaries– Live Show, Acme Gallery in London (1976). The film was sent to the International Festival of Women Artists, Film Museum, Copenhagen, Denmark, 1980. It languished in the archives in Denmark until its re-discovery by the KØN – Gender Museum Denmark in 2021. A new 4k digital scan was made by the DJCAD Media Preservation Lab at the University of Dundee in October 2021.