Annis Joslin

LAZY (6 mins 10 secs 2023) Lazy explores the body in relation to memory, family, mental health and domestic (dis)comfort. Present throughout is a seemingly banal 'Lazyboy' chair, negotiated physically through movement as its story is gradually revealed. The work emerged from a story told by Kerry, a survivor of domestic abuse, and was developed with an intergenerational movement group (Flexer & Sandiland’s Acting Our Age) and Pyrotechnic expert Mike Sansom. The making of Lazy began in a dance studio as a rehearsal experiment, to test how other women might respond to this object that dominated their space. Their collective encounter with the Lazyboy informed its documented journey into a black and then outdoor space. LAZY is part of an ongoing conversation about the ways in objects affect, infect and sometimes defect from our lives. Film by: Cole & Joslin Performers: Clea Godsill, Acting Our Age Movement Group Music: Jim Kirby Sarah Cole & Annis Joslin are an award-winning artist duo who have been collaborating since 2017. Their approach is to make work through social art encounters, conversations and multi-disciplinary workshops, leading to co-authored video, drawings, texts, images, performances, installations and presentations. Their work is shown at film and digital festivals, in galleries, public spaces and within community contexts, often as part of a hands-on conversation with audiences.

Cole & Joslin (2022) Additional footage from The Kiss in the Tunnel by George Albert Smith (1899) Courtesy of Screen Archive South East

A silent video created remotely by Annis Joslin and Seo Hye Lee via a game of video exquisite corpse repurposing early films courtesy of Screen Archive South East’s collection. Annis and Seo Hye are based on opposite sides of the UK, and their collaboration began during the uncertain times of Covid-19, when they began to find ways to test out ideas remotely by exchanging a series of videos via WhatsApp. Inspired by the inventiveness and playfulness of the early film pioneers, Exquisite Archive is based on both the game of consequences and exquisite corpse, but using video to create a new silent film from a series of accidental and considered visual responses generated from observations of their everyday surroundings. Originally co-commissioned by Videoclub and Corridor for Days of Wonder at Hove Museum and Art Gallery 2022. Early films courtesy of Screen Archive South East’s collection. (in order of appearance) Flying the Foam and Fancy Diving by James Williamson, 1906 The Magic Extinguisher by James Williamson, 1901 Our New Errand Boy by James Williamson, 1905 Washing the Sweep by James Williamson, 1898

STATIC is a 360 film, made by Sarah Cole & Annis Joslin over 2020/21. The viewer is placed into an uncanny domestic home, a looming suburban emptiness and intense dream-state environments where the actions of the characters resonate with frustration, desire, routine and an uncertain sense of agency. STATIC plays with scale, emotional instability, your sense of responsibility and our everyday failures in communication. It is darkly funny and a bit disturbing, but ultimately offers up some hope from the limited fractious scraps of what seems possible in this characters world.

This is a trailer for a 30 minute film comissioned by People United and made in 2018/19 in collaboration with Sarah Cole with women who attend Joining Hearts, Joining Hands, a support group for survivors of domestic violence and/or sexual abuse. Journeying through six passages of time, Messy Business was made with women who have experienced domestic violence and/or sexual abuse. Playful, insistent, dark yet uplifting, Messy Business is an elegy to their wisdom, resilience and pain, giving a voice to those who kept quiet but now want to shout off the rooftops. Made with Sarah Cole, as social arts practitioners, our aim in making this work was to find a form through which to communicate some of the experiences, regrets and aspirations of these women. The creative process involved exploring images, objects, words and mechanisms through which to talk about lived experience. Consisting of six interconnected segments, the shorter videos can also be used individually, as provocations, activist tools to help people speak about violence in their own lives.

Cut to a broken collage of numerous versions of Burt Bacharach’s eponymous song as most famously sung by Dusty Springfield, The Look of Love slowly unravels the illusion of romantic love as sold to us through the pages of glossy magazines. The lover’s gaze is contrived through a sequence of cuts between different male and female air-brushed beauties of the white western ideal fantasy pulled out of magazines and held up like puppets by the artist’s hands. As we watch we may smile knowingly but the dream gradually shatters and the images become fractured and distorted revealing the reality of ageing and perhaps the false promise of love’s myth that we are complicit in consuming. At the end, we are reminded that this was in itself a performance as the artist's hand is seen drawing the final corrupted face from the frame.

As night falls National Trust staff and long term volunteers share private moments and reflections of their time at Mottisfont.

Suppose (3mins 20 secs 2004 Mini dv) Suppose follows a woman in bed with her thoughts. As the video cuts from face to object, a voice over indulges in imaginings beginning with suppose this…suppose that… with every cut there is a change of possibility.

A surreal endurance exercise: A woman sits holding a tape machine on her shoulder, with the speaker pressed to her ear, eyes locked to the camera lens for the duration of a song about the perils of love, the volume full blast.