Stuart Croft: Eternal Return
“What closure might you bring, what fissure in this untimely loop?”
Stuart Croft, script for Remetior
Eternal Return is a major exhibition of films by Leeds-born artist Stuart Croft, the first since his untimely death in 2015. Visitors journey through a sequence of immersive spaces, each containing an infinitely looping moving image work with no distinct beginning, middle or end. These narrative films transport us from the bedroom of a gothic mansion where we eavesdrop on a macabre fable to the passenger seat of a car on an endless road trip, and from the abandoned film-set of a 1950’s musical to a spacecraft flying at blinding speed.
Stuart Croft’s work imaginatively collapse the boundaries between art and cinema, incorporating the gestures, images and production values of Hollywood movies into the gallery space. His films confound and subvert our expectations of conventional genres such as the road trip movie, the shaggy dog story, film noir and MGM musicals. Over twenty years and a body of work comprising 17 films, Croft continually returned to themes of power, recurrence, entrapment and desire.
Four of Croft’s works; Stag Without a Heart (2010), Drive In (2007), Remetior (2015), and Comma 39 (2011), will be shown at Leeds Art Gallery, with others screened as part of Leeds International Film Festival’s spotlight on the artist from 1-17 November. The exhibition includes the world premiere of Remetior, the last film the artist produced with sound design finished posthumously by his friends and collaborators.
Subtitled and audio-described screenings will be shown every Sunday throughout the exhibition from 11am- 3pm.
This exhibition is supported by the Stuart Croft Foundation, Arts Council England and Leeds City Council.
