The films of Mark Lewis are comparable to an ambitious “making of” that questions the industry’s methods while skilfully manipulating the reality of its illusions. Lewis creates, as he describes it, a “cinema part,” that is, he isolates its component parts (the credits, the end, the extras, the genre, and so on) with the goal of rearranging them into a distinct work. This method allows him to reveal the rhetorical strategies of image producers, to observe the way in which cinema generates its own forms, to break down its codes and formal conventions, to destabilize its generic features, or to comment ironically on its spectacular measures. Lewis is also interested in modes of film production and the division of labour that they entail. This is what is suggested by the series Location Photos, which takes us to a film’s pre-production stage, when shooting locations are found. These kinds of images are essentially preliminary sketches not usually intended for public exhibition. Their often banal aspect, combined with the lack of adequate context, invalidates their informative function. In effect, lacking an interpretive framework—a commentary or advertising slogan—these images give us very little information. They contain no precise information about the nature of the film and do not always make it possible to identify the shooting location or, even less, to picture the action that took place. At most, they allude to existing or forthcoming films. Location Photos thus produces a peculiar sensation, as though the meaning of the images were being twisted to reveal a conflict between a literal interpretation and the function to which their title refers. Lewis’s photographs have lost their illustrative function in favour of an aesthetic autonomy..

Mark Lewis was born in Canada; he lives and works in London. Since the mid-1990s, he has explored the techniques of cinema in order to question its history and conventions. His works, often filmed in Cinemascope and transferred to DVD, take the form of very large projections in vast spaces. Recognized both in North America and in Europe, his films have been featured in many solo exhibitions and have been presented in group exhibitions that have conceptualized the growing interest of contemporary artists in the temporal and narrative properties of film: Re-makes at CAPC Musée d’art contemporain de Bordeaux, and (Based upon) True Stories, at Witte de With in Rotterdam, en 2003; Liverpool Biennal at the Tate Liverpool, in 2002; Mois de la Photo à Montréal, in 2001; Intelligence: New British Art 2000 at the Tate Britain in London, in 2000; Cinema! Cinema! The Cinematic Experience at the Stedelijk Van Abbemuseum d’Eindhoven, in 1999; and L’effet cinéma, at the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal, in 1997.