'Die Cuts' Exhibition by Tyrone Lebon

Exhibited at Frieze No.9 Cork Street, 'Die Cuts' is a collaboration between photographer and filmmaker Tyrone Lebon and musician Dom Maker of Mount Kimbie. The 14-minute film and 33-minute album accompany one another on independent loops.

The film is accompanied by 10 Cibachrome photographic prints enlarged from strips of the original 35mm film positives.

Buy the 'Die Cuts' catalogue here.

PRESS RELEASE:

The looped reel of 35mm film winds through the mechanism of a projector, where twenty thousand frames move along the tracks and rollers as a fourteen-minute ouroboros. Winding inwards and simultaneously outwards, they snake in every direction from the spinning palm of the projector’s metal disk, and the asynchronous cycles of music and image create an endless series of unique combinations for the viewer.

Lebon began filming soon after the end of a significant relationship. Following a desire to reflect on the nature of intimacy, loss and memory, he travelled to film couples and individuals from different countries, who were open to sharing the typically-private intimacies of their sex lives. The footage was later intercut with Lebon’s own personal travel and holiday footage and reworked through successive stages of bleaching, scratching, painting, melting and cutting. Lebon commissioned an engineer to customise a number of original die-cutting machines so that specific pieces of the animated frames could be cut out and interchanged with one another. 'Die Cuts' is the result of over three thousand hours of analogue post-production processes.

'Die Cuts' plays with the inevitable effects of time on memory and emotion. Layers of memory distort and disorient; beauty is met with discordance and disappearance. Blunt scratches and cut-outs transform and mutilate love and longing. Life repeats and circles back on itself. Memories overlap and are re-formed into new impressions that never were. The experiences of intimacy, love, and lust are all finite in a lifetime. Through each repeated loop, the film is gradually worn down further against the abrasive surfaces of the machine, which gives it its movement. Over time, the images slowly erode, until nothing remains.

'Die Cuts' (2022) looping positive 35mm film print (14 minutes 7 seconds).
Kinoton FP30 Projector with ST2000 looper.
Accompanied by looping audio ‘Die Cuts’ album (2022) by Dom Maker of Mount Kimbie (32 minutes 33 seconds).
10 Unique Cibachrome prints approx 186x126cm (varied sizes) dry mounted onto 2mm aluminium. Unique works paired with the 35mm original positive film frames.


4-5 November 2023
7pm-10pm

Frieze Gallery,
No.9 Cork Street,
W1S 3LL