This new film piece by British artists Graham Ellard and Stephen Johnstone makes compelling use of two contrasting but related locations: Carlo Scarpa's famous Gypsotheca plaster-cast gallery in the Canova Museum in Possagno, Northern Italy, and the Venice-based plaster workshops of Eugenio de Luigi, one of Scarpa's most important collaborators. Shot using a spring-wound camera, and creatively deploying various in-camera techniques such as time-lapse and multiple-exposure, the film follows (and further illuminates) the play of light in the Gypsotheca over a number of days as it produces a constantly fluid and changing environment for the appreciation of Canova's plaster-casts. In doing so, the piece forges a relationship between Scarpa's revelatory use of natural light to present and stage Canova's casts and maquettes, and the ability of 16mm film to register its subtleties.

Graham Ellard and Stephen Johnstone have collaborated since 1993. They have exhibited internationally in museums and galleries including Tate Liverpool; Centre Georges Pompidou; MAXXI, Rome; Van Alen Institute, NYC; and Chicago Architecture Foundation. Focusing on the relationship between film and architecture, and exploring the fundamental role of light in articulating modernist architectural space, their film and video work has examined the buildings of Erich Mendelsohn, Cesar Manrique, Basil Spence, Egon Eiermann, László Moholy-Nagy, and Franco Albini. Their abiding formal preoccupations—the camera's ability to produce ambiguities of scale, depth or shallowness, transparency, and reflection, and the intersections of architectural planes, vistas, apertures, and screens—center on altered forms of attention, and the resulting intensity of looking comes from using the camera to magnify and study architectural details and fleeting atmospheric effects.

Film and Video Umbrella is Britain's premier commissioner of artists' film and video work. The organization's director, Steven Bode, will oversee and curate the project. During his time as director (which spans from 1993 to the present), Bode has initiated well over a hundred different projects, including major new works from internationally acclaimed artists such as Isaac Julien, Gillian Wearing, Jane & Louise Wilson, Johan Grimonprez, Daria Martin, Tacita Dean, and Mark Lewis.

Film and Video Umbrella commissions, curates, produces, and presents film, video, and other moving-image works by artists that are staged in collaboration with galleries and other cultural partners across the UK. Founded in 1988, Film and Video Umbrella has been at the forefront of this vibrant and expanding area of practice, promoting innovation through its support of some of the most exciting figures on the contemporary scene. During this time, the organization has commissioned and produced numerous artists' projects, ranging from ambitious multi-screen installations to shorter film and video pieces, as well as various online commissions