The former gold mining town of St Bathans lies deep in the heart of the Maniototo in New Zealand's Otago region. Its most prominent feature is the Blue Lake, a small turquoise body of water formed by the artificial process of gold-sluicing in the late 19th century. Over three months in early 2016 while on a CIRCUIT residency, Canadian experimental filmmaker Alexandre Larose made a series of film works exploring St Bathans’ scenic environs and the domestic spaces of an iconic original mud-brick house. The selected spaces were then subject to intense image manipulation through in-camera techniques, suggesting slippages in time and place.
A single channel video/audio installation for translucent screen, St Bathans repetitions 1/2/16 - 21/3/16 (portraits de Jacques à St Bathans, avec interlude de paysages, sur écran translucide) is an ethereal record of the environs of St Bathans. The landscape is often inhabited by the artist's father who moves through interiors, his movements tracked and traced in heavy layers of time and place. Paired to an experimental soundtrack of ambient sound the resulting work is an enveloping and textured record of an encounter with a foreign landscape. A number of screenings of the film have recently been realised at venues including the New York Film Festival.