Still Motion: Jason Shulman

The Rebecca Hossack Art Gallery: Little Havana Project
Jason Shulman

Still Motion
Private View: 20 July 2023

The Rebecca Hossack Art Gallery Little Havana Project presents Still Motion, an exhibition of new work by the British artist Jason Shulman. Featuring a series of long-exposure photographs of critical moments of our recent history, Still Motion marks a new chapter in the artist’s decade-long practice of multimedia experimentation. By manipulating temporality and technology, Shulman opens a new door to our perception of some of the most iconic events and images of our shared cultural world. 

The project began when the London-based Shulman decided to photograph the coverage of the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi: training his camera on his television, he took a series of long-exposure photographs of selected events, freezing dreamlike, fluid, action-charged representations of what the rest of the world was experiencing as HD motion on their screens. This idea of gathering all the light present in an event led to his celebrated series Photographs of Films where the entire running time of a movie is captured in a single image.

His new body of work takes iconic filmed moments from history as the subject for visual investigation. The History Photographs inhabit a liminal third space between the moving and the static, opening up a new way of experiencing culturally familiar events. 

From Muhammad Ali’s knock-out punch on George Foreman, to the interment of Queen Elizabeth II, from Marilyn Monroe’s rendition of ‘Happy Birthday Mr. President’ to Stanley Kubrick’s masterpiece, 2001: A Space Odyssey, Shulman reconfigures the flow of the moving-image through his own fixed lens, extending the exposure-time on his camera for seconds, minutes, or hours, to create a new category of representation. He captures feelings that are not seen by the naked eye, giving us the aura rather than just the details of what has happened. The atmospheric shift created through his process provides a transformative lens to an unseen world which is strangely dynamic and suffused with surreality.

Currently living and working in London, Shulman has exhibited across Europe and the United States since the 1990s, and his works are held in important private collections across the globe. His work has been shown at COB (2021); Somerset House, London (2014); Shoreditch Town Hall, London (2014); La Maison Rouge, Paris (2013); The Wand, Berlin (2013); MONA, Tasmania, Australia (2012); The Rachofsky House, Dallas, Texas, USA (2011) and White Cube Gallery (Hoxton), London (2008). His work was also presented at Photo London, Somerset House, London (2017) and the Third Moscow Biennale, Garage Museum of Contemporary Art, Moscow (2009).