Art Now is a programme of exhibitions that aims to promote discussion and awareness of new art in Britain. For the latest in the series, Dryden Goodwin will present Closer, a three-screen video installation.
Goodwin works with both still and moving images to investigate the way we interact physically and psychologically with urban spaces. In Closer (video installation) , Goodwin moves through the city after dark filming solitary individuals seen in brightly-lit buildings. Focusing on them from a distance, he simultaneously touches their skin and traces their profiles with a beam of light from a long distance laser pen. The use of a zoom lens further confounds the distance between the camera and its subject. This visual ambiguity, combined with a multi-layered soundtrack, manipulates the relationship between the viewer and the viewed, creating an atmosphere which embraces hostility and empathy, intrusion and intimacy.
Dryden Goodwin is fascinated by the urban infrastructure and its effect on the individual. Using a variety of media including video, film, sound, drawing and painting, his work has focused on environments such as airports and hospitals in order to investigate the encounters we have with strangers in the metropolis. Goodwin received critical acclaim for his trilogy of video installations About 1998, Within 1998 and Wait 2000 which explore our innate curiosity about other people, of watching and being watched.
Born in Bournemouth in 1971, Goodwin studied at the Slade School of Fine Art, London. He has participated in a number of solo and group exhibitions in this country and abroad. Recent exhibitions include a solo show at Stephen Friedman Gallery, London (2000); New Contemporaries (1997); Video Cult/ures, ZKM, Karlsruhe (1999); Video Positive: The Other Side of Zero, Tate Liverpool (2000) and The Fantastic Recurrence of Certain Situations, Sala de Exposiciones del Canal de Isabell II, Madrid (2001). In 2000 Goodwin was awarded a £75,000 fellowship over three years from NESTA (National Endowment for Science, Technology and Arts). He lives and works in London.
The exhibition is curated by Lizzie Carey-Thomas, Curator, Tate Britain.