
Sheena Macrae, Gone 2002 (image still, detail), courtesy the artist.

Sheena Macrae, Gone 2002 (image still, detail), courtesy the artist.

Sheena Macrae, Gone 2002 (image still, detail), courtesy the artist.

Sheena Macrae, Gone 2002 (image still, detail), courtesy the artist.

Sheena Macrae, Gone 2002 (image still, detail), courtesy the artist.
Gone is a video work that compresses the entire three and a half-hour epic Gone With the Wind into five minutes. Here the quintessential Hollywood epic is redelivered and exposed. This movie zips by, each frame sharply visible despite travelling at break neck speed. The video gives the impression of a restructured edit but is in fact evenly condensed and arrived at structurally. The pivotal points of the film are reconfigured by lurching into real time to catch a repeating line of dialogue, both denying the systematic approach and reiterating it through content. Macrae's version forcefully and hilariously emphasises the notion of the epic and its ambition to portray a universe of events by giving it all in an instant. But it also addresses the emotional/psychological aspect of that epic and its depiction of time and fiction. It is a parody of the notion of time, which becomes both extensive (in a fiction of world history) and meaningless in the seductive glitter of a Hollywood depiction. Our heroine remains unaffected, a resistor in the big machine of time where everything transpires, everything changes; yet she remains inert in the whirlwind. Her repetitions at seminal moments within the speeding images defer potential meaning and the video inverts its gaze back towards the viewer.

Sheena Macrae, Gone 2002 (image still, detail), courtesy the artist.
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