Masterton’s work is strongly linked with minimal and conceptual ideas around movement and dance which she compares neutral, specific qualities of objects or concepts to her own task based ordinary actions. Described often as ‘minimal encounters’ or ‘drawings in space’, whose materials include language, movement, dance, and basic interaction with sculptural elements. Appropriating the minimalist vernacular as a conceptual strategy, she is known for a reductive series of works that parallels minimal performance with an assessment of forms and the hypothetical permanence of their messages. Masterton uses the simplest and most economical meeting point between behavior and conceptual aesthetics within movement. Using form as culture in dynamic production that is technically crude and conceptually complex form of image-making. Using the physical and conceptual frames of ‘happenings’ and ‘situations’ as a model for community. Masterton parallels social systems, motifs and symbols with conceptual minimal aesthetics to create dynamic tension between materiality and ideas.
Primary Situations Framed (2009) draws upon the legacy of Structuralist film to examine and interpret modes of image production. Primary Situations Framed (2009) shot on super-16 film, records two dancers performing the seminal choreography from Wayne McGregor’s ballet Entity, choreographed to break classic formal ballet with intercepting pedestrian movement. Using a diagram from Doris Humphrey’s 1958 book The Art of Making Dances to determine the camera's positions as strength points in space, Masterton examines the way cultural production is framed and transformed through different methods of representation. Creating interventions and tensions between neo classicism and modernism. Vacillating between two disparate readymade subjects to both expose a synchronicity between forms and interrogate the construction of the image within the film frame.
Filmed from pre-determined positioning of the camera based upon a series of 1960’s diagrams ‘illustrating perception,’ Masterton creates a drawing in space with camera movements that dance seperately to the choregraphy. By breaking the space into potential relative strength points based on the diagram, Masterton uses the camera to shift the focus of the image from the mechanics of vision to the subjectivity of the diagramatic strength points in space. In referencing the foundation of Structuralist film, histories of dance on film, Masterton explores the tension between neo classicism and modernism, the artist asks the audience to revisit cultural production from the perspective of a collaboration that has never happened.
Studio Voltaire
Studio Artist
London
United Kingdom
Europe
