Title: Overhead

Duration: 01.13

Media: s16mm colour reversal film

Composed from over 250 images of aeroplanes, ‘Overhead’ presents the aeroplane as both machine and image - showing Jon’s sprawling interest in the archive and the phenomenological power of the image. 

Air travel was built around the promise of overcoming distance. Faster aircrafts, larger airports and expanding networks made places that had once been days apart reachable within hours - a techno-utopia. The airline, machines or liveries pictured in this work were themselves products of that optimism and have already become obsolete. 

Now an ordinary part of contemporary daily life, ubiquitous infrastructure, they are representative of mobility, global capitalism, technological progress, and environmental consequence amongst a myriad of others. The work does not explain or foreground the rhythm of the montaged images, they are shown with equal duration. 

Transferred from printed image to digital file, and then from screen to film and presented back through a 16mm projector. The images have been scanned, ordered and re-photographed onto s16mm Ektachrome reversal film stock. The film exists only in material form.

Duration, tempo and mechanical rhythm function like instrumentation through a stream of imagery, but the act of looking here encourages slowness and attentiveness.