Thinking about the nature of the ‘self’, there are so many contrasting and harmonic layers to 'identity' that make a simple definition or understanding difficult. Through using voice over and personal archive footage, Léna's film seeks to unpack this layered complexity and reach to the core of what the ‘self’ can be in an honest, vulnerable way - a human perspective in an increasingly mediated and technological world. 

L'autoritratto



What happens when the material body is scanned in, compressed and reconfigured virtually? Where does this non-body now exist? How do we navigate titillation and desire in relation to the simulated, representational acts of sexualised behaviour performed by virtual women? If we can access 360º scans of naked women online without restriction, what does this mean for their bodily autonomy?


Léna Lewis-King was considering these questions when she began to make "Refigure", a short ballad-turned-striptease video inspired by Blue Velvet, Roy Orbison's "In Dreams", and the otherworldly performances of Italian singer Mina.


Over the course of the 3:31 video, you see a human-like figure swaying above a stage, slowly peeling off each layer of skin-clothing, stripping down to floating lingerie and eventually disrobing into nothingness. In all this layering and delayering, you might wonder where the physical footage begins and ends - how much was performed in reality, and how much was constructed virtually. This indecipherability adds to the feeling of the 'uncanny', the same feeling evoked by interacting with photogrammed, hollowed out virtual 'people' that exist within computers and VR headsets.

Refigure

"Tapestries" is an experimental animation intended to be shown on a 4:3 cube monitor. Within the work, Léna explores the combinations that can be made between digital rotoscoping, live footage, keyframe tracking and hand drawn rotoscoping. 

This piece was made specifically for the Point and Shoot group exhibition. All footage is compiled from Léna's personal archives, of animations made over a 3 year period. The soundtrack was composed by Léna Lewis-King, and text adapted from a poem.

Tapestries

Filmed during lockdown, ‘De Luz /Of Light’ explores Portuguese coastal landscapes through observing its natural rhythms (such as light and motion) and re-shapes them into an audio-visual experience of fleeting perceptions and cyclic rituals. Intended for screening with a 16:27 aspect ratio. The soundtrack was composed by sound artist Michelle Lewis-King.

De Luz/Of Light

“European Desert” developed from an initial interview with the artist Nick Fudge. Léna and Nick discussed his personal experiences with 'Deserts' as creative environments. Traveling through the deserts, the intellectual and emotional relationship he has with American desert landscapes, and how the desert landscape completely transformed his outlook on life. This initial conversation lead Léna on to think about the location of the deserts as a semi-spiritual landscape (in the sense of being a place beyond the human). She became interested in the Tabernas Desert in Spain, where many Spaghetti Westerns were filmed. The aim was to explore the poetic and transformative power of the desert landscape through narrative and emotion.

The film experiments with using three different “Medias” of filmmaking within one film, in order to visually explore time, and the specific aesthetics of time related to cinema. This method of montage is chosen to convey the concept of heading towards the empty and uninhabitable spaces of the desert as technological progress. Within the process of production, Léna found the film began to take shape more as a piece about the media itself, and less about the loss of human presence within a desert landscape.

European Desert

"Untitled Sequence", is an artist film that explores the material processes of filmmaking such as visual narration, cinematography, soundtrack creation and film editing from the perspective of a young female artist – a perspective that is still under-represented in conventional filmmaking. The film engages with contemporary issues of identity and allegories of artistic practice, and is influenced by Jean Cocteau and Maya Deren’s films (particularly their creation of  visual ‘dreamscapes’), Nobuhiko Ôbayashi (especially his editing processes) and Lee Miller’s embodiment of both the artist and the artist’s muse in her work both in front of and behind the camera.

Untitled Sequence

Titled after Walter Benjamin’s ‘The Angel of History’ essay, ‘A Storm is What We Call Progress’ is a short experimental essay film reflecting on the history of moving image, analog photography, the archive and the development of technology.


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Léna Lewis-King