Sam Taylor-Wood, b. 1967

During a five second time scale Sam Taylor-Wood rotates the camera on its axis, the product, this single panoramic image which, despite being decidedly sequential in nature, is ultimately devoid of narrative. In the present work we view the inhabitants comfortable in their setting, utterly unaware of one another although confined within a common space.  The subjects are divorced from their affluent surrounds, held within staged scenarios and left frozen in their fallacious solitude leading us to speculate on how these ambiguities will resolve- if they ever do.

The artist described the method behind her work as breaking “… down a scene into its basic building blocks. First the narrative structure is removed then the whole thing is filtered and divided into separate sequences”, a technique that prevails in Five Revolutionary Seconds VII.