Tony Sinden: Dichotomy

Tony Sinden has been active in making film and video installations for exhibition in the cinema, gallery and open spaces for over three decades. Sinden began working with film, sound and expanded cinema in 1966 and progressed to making major installations for gallery spaces such as Arnolfini, the Hayward Gallery and the Serpentine during the 1970s. Picture This commissioned Sinden to create a video installation that is a “time-image” of the landscape of the American west in which the changing meaning of landscape is contemplated from multiple moments in time.

The dramatic American Meltwater is the starting point for this exploration of nature, technology and the environment. Sinden’s installation is a loop that is encountered in the middle of a darkened gallery space. Recalling the large scale landscape paintings from a century earlier, the images are seen on a large panoramic screen, suspended in the middle of the space, allowing the viewer to walk around the image that can be seen from both sides of the screen.

(Jeffrey Skoller in Everything Must Go catalogue, 2003)

Exhibition:
19 October 2000, LUX Centre, London
10 – 26 November 2000, Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, Berkeley, California
11 November 2000, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco, California