Wallpaper* Film Platform: Impossible House

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Introducing the Wallpaper* Film Platform; a springboard for the most exciting global talent working in the moving image. Each week, we will bring you a new film that describes the Wallpaper* world, through architecture, art, interiors or travel. This page will become a unique directory of imagemakers; pioneers and disruptors redefining the visual landscape right now.

For our inaugural series – ‘Documenting Domesticity’ – we gave select Wallpaper* collaborators an open brief: to depict the environments in which we live.
Watch this space.

For her second Wallpaper* Film Platform offering, photographer Adrianna Glaviano visited industrial designer Russel Wright’s former home and studio in the Lower Hudson Valley, New York State. Manitoga, named from the Algonquin word meaning ‘a place of great spirit’ used to be a granite quarry and was completely transformed over the course of many years by Wright. The home and surrounding land is a clear example of his vision of design in harmony with nature.

Artist duo Middernacht and Alexander created untitled video 1 from moments caught on journeys between Lanzarote, France and Belgium. There are moments in travel that are ‘repetitive, boring and mundane’, the duo say. In these moments, ‘people tend to change, and get besides themselves, feel superior and perhaps stop being “domestic”, even in the most beautiful and exclusive places.’ Through bumpy car rides and crashing waves, the ‘mundane’ snapshot is elevated into something visually exciting.

Impossible House – by still-life photographer William Bunce and set designer Lisa Jahovic – is an abstract film that follows an animated sphere as it explores a seemingly impossible house, through windows and down stairwells. The narrative takes an Orwellian turn as the ball gets caught in a recess that sees him fall into a pile of other balls, in which we loose sight of our protagonist, our ‘roll’ model. The resulting film offers a landscape that challenges our perceptions of scale, and a low-fi approach to scenic painting and ball ‘blowing’, utilising in-camera tricks as a fresh antidote to digital manipulation.

British director and photographer George Harvey uses his (almost) exclusive palette of black and white to present highly technical explorations of shape, light and texture. This new film piece is the first installation in a long term personal project, playing with distorted perception of time. Wittily titled Don’t Cry, it’s a tongue-in-cheek musing on momentary mistakes, as well as a visual exploration of milk’s velvety texture, which splays sumptuously from the glass.

Long time Wallpaper* contributor Leon Chew has collaborated with filmmaker and visual artist Paul Anton Smith on a new film work in response to a conversation between artist László Moholy-Nagy and designer Alva Aalto in 1929. We see Chew’s signatures – layering of images, graphic forms and bold use of colour, brought to life in this immersive journey through image and sound, (which comes courtesy of Finnish electronic musician Vladislav Delay).

Through still life, performance and reportage, Polly Brown’s photographic investigations focus on sources as diverse as airports, office blocks, computer screens and motorways. Her work takes the form of prints, film and books, effectively conjuring up pyschogeographic tendencies from the seemingly mundane. She makes her Wallpaper* film debut with her new work Domesticated, which explores the ideals of domestic bliss through object use, functionality and conformity.