None of Sarah Beddington’s video pieces have been staged. They present ‘found’ images in which the camera never moves during one continuous shot. Her video entitled 180 degrees, shot in a toy store in Las Vegas, shows two battery operated dogs who seem destined for an encounter, but a leash on the small dachshund and the trajectory of the pink poodle just prevent this from taking place. ...here we go round the mulberry bush, also shot in a Las Vegas toy store at the time the war in Iraq was still officially taking place, shows a toy soldier at the center of an automatonic mayhem; a horse chases a pig in an endless, hopeless circle; hamsters

in pink translucent domes roll around until they end up on their backs; a fat lady (in bikini) does sit-ups oblivious to the chaos. Luxor Levels was made inside the Luxor Palace Hotel, also in Las Vegas. Shot through a pane of glass, large reflections of figures behind the viewer exist in a parallel world, disconnected from tiny figures that make their way to and from rooms on various levels of the hotel. This contrast of scale heightens the aesthetic disconnect of the city. Invisible Woman is also shot through glass, from the interior of a café at night. Looking out of the window at the store across the street, dark silhouettes of people and traffic passing by beyond the glass make visible the reflection of a woman in profile eating and drinking inside. The woman exists behind the viewer and is only made visible for sporadic moments by that which is outside.

All of these videos were shot within non-domestic, publicly accessible spaces (such as hotels, casinos, cafés and malls) where natural light is filtered out – with the result that real time dissolves. Moreover, by zooming in on often overlooked details, the everyday becomes further abstracted and surreal. Beddington’s eye for places of aesthetic potential is coupled with a masterful narrative ability that solidifies these cultural and visual fragments into evocative tableaux. These scenarios – whether in the repetition of battery operated toys, revolving restaurant tables or reflections in a pane of glass – enmesh viewers in a world in which architectural scale and narrative identification trade places. The result is a world that is hypnotically voyeuristic – yet unsettlingly familiar.

Sarah Beddington is a British artist based in New York, who works with painting, video and installation. She recently completed a residency at ISCP in New York. She has a masters degree from Central Saint Martins School of Art and has shown extensively in the UK, Europe and the USA . Her work is in private and public collections including the Arts Council of Great Britain.