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Snazell James

Artist/filmmaker James Snazell is based in Manchester, UK and produces work for single screen and installation. I create motion graphic short films using photographs to explore urban rhythms through visual and audio montage. My work relates to a process of creating accidental elements within a sequence of movements which are countered with a process that is expressive; experimenting with the graphic to give an abstract quality allowing the rawness and sensuality of urban surroundings to stain and texture the work through a process that is as much about destroying as creating visual and aural surfaces. I look to explore how reality and the imagination combine to create our experience of our surroundings in terms of the urban context. We are all dreamers, we are all producers of images, fragmental narratives: seductive, mysterious, unexpected expressions of our fantasies and desires. I use digital technology/film (and its possibilities) as an interface for the crossover between the imagination and reality. I’m fascinated by the many steps along the way in the evolution of my work. It has a core spirit but the “body” of a film – its surfaces and textures and rhythms of moving – change and grow over time. My work is about the attempt to externalise an inner world, which when this internal space hits fresh air, it takes on new characteristics. There is the initial dreaming up of the idea along the way that for me happens over the course of many months and it is quite an ephemeral process. Then comes the many months of production, which sees the work changing and developing in an unknown way from its initial process. This phase of production includes the collaboration of others who add their own ideas and talent to the film, and crucially one can never imagine how a project will materialize. Then, there is the presentation of the work including the audience reaction, which is never how you imagined how it might be. The trajectory of the work I produce has its own organic course, which for me is symbolised by the idea of wandering.