Tacita Dean - Frith Street Gallery

Tacita Dean’s new film JG opened at the Frith Street Gallery in September and is surprisingly enthralling for a film with no narrative. If you want to experience a beautifully tranquil cinematic experience, head to the gallery on Golden Square and allow yourself to be immersed in the sounds and panoramic shots of the Utah Great Salt Lake. Since Dean’s nomination for the Turner Prize in 1998, she has risen to prominence as a film-based artist and is associated with contemporary artists such as Sam Taylor Wood and Jake and Dinos Chapman.

In 2011, her work Film was projected onto the far wall in Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall, a silent piece inspired by her conviction that the replacement of analogue with digital was the death of film. Her work tends to follow the themes of loss and tragedy, yet is unexpectedly playful.

From close-ups of salt crystals to wide shots of the mountainous Utah desert, JG is enigmatically beautiful. She gives us water droplets and lakes, macro and micro: it's cerebral but arresting. Highly technical editing and fiddly shooting (she created an exposure technique called 'aperture gate masking', which we're still trying to work out), Dean is a true mistress of her craft. 

The exhibition also includes her C/O Jolyon series, a collection of re-appropriated pre-war German postcards that are for the first time being displayed. Dean masterfully alters these original postcards, again playfully leaving her mark on an historical place.

Unlike other exhibitions around London today, this exhibition does not require you to stay for a lengthy amount of time, and other gallery visitors tend to come alone, so don’t be afraid to do so yourself.

Also available at the gallery, are her 300 limited edition signed books of her most recent works.