Frances Scott - Aureole

Frances Scott's Aureole commissioned by Matt's Gallery for MattFlix, will screen in 'Diffraction of Language' at Rencontres Internationales Paris/Berlin, 2-8 May 2022 - with Apichatpong Weerasethakul retrospective and Dara Birnbaum carte blanche.

Aureole screens at 6pm 3 May, in the 18h programme at Palais des Beaux Arts w/ Adel Abidin, Sandro Aguilar, Pauline Julier, Laure Prouvost, Sibi Sekar.

Frances Scott, Aureole (2021)
Single channel, 7 min 32 sec, 16mm film and betacam video transferred to digital, colour, stereo

In meteorology, the aureole is an atmospheric, optical phenomenon; the visible inner disc of a corona, produced by the diffraction of light from the sun or the moon, bright starlight or planet-light.

Aureole brings together unused celestial images from Scott’s earlier film, Diviner (2017), with vocoder-readings from Ursula K. Le Guin’s novel ‘The Left Hand of Darkness’ (1969), scored by Chu-Li Shewring’s remix of the House track ‘Brighter Days’ (1992) by Cajmere featuring Dajae. Aureole is a transition between a ‘lost’ chapter from Diviner and Wendy (2022, forthcoming), a film fan-letter to composer Wendy Carlos, whose many interests include solar eclipse photography. Accelerating to a euphoric end, the film is the duration of the longest total solar eclipse, when the moon completely covers the sun.

‘You will witness the day become near-night, like the deepest twilight. Sunset colors bathe the full horizon, while a gaping black hole gazes down at you from the inky sky, eye-like and surreal, surrounded by the solar corona, a halo of pearly ephemeral light of delicate beauty. Each time the corona looks quite different, and like an old friend's face you'll recognize each in photographs.’
Wendy Carlos, www.wendycarlos.com

Aureole was commissioned by Matt’s Gallery, London and is accompanied by a new text ‘Winter is a planet’ by Dave Tompkins, available through the MattFlix section of our website.