Picture This: Ben Rivers
26 November - 05 December
Picture This Atelier, Bristol, UK

Two films by artist Ben Rivers which muse on the ideas of Charles Darwin - one through the field of island biogeography, considering possible future Utopias evolving on isolated islands, the other through the thoughts of a 75-year-old amateur inventor and Darwin enthusiast.

"How come it's like this, how did it get like this? And the thing that'll amaze you - Ben - is, the time; it has taken so very, very long... and some things happen very, very slowly." Origin of the Species

Picture This presents the first opportunity to see an element from a new four-screen work currently in production. Slow Action focuses on the relationship we have - and may have in the future - to islands. Ben Rivers' investigation considers the possible future Utopias evolving on isolated islands.

Exquisitely beautiful, poetic and serene, yet exact and rigorous in composition and timing, Origin of the Species is a tentative, fleeting portrait of a man about whom we are told little but learn much: a man of inventions, of science, of solitude; and to whom Darwin's On the Origin of Species is evidently dear. The world is seen as simultaneously familiar and alien; full of wonder and composed of a palette of dream-colours, alternately rich and colour-saturated and steely or tawny.