Simon Payne

Simon Payne's videos are predominantly orientated around bold graphic forms and highly structured sequences that produce unexpected colour combinations and conflicting planes. Sometimes there are contingent elements in his work, which correspond with incidental indications of the artist's hand, but his approach to cinema is primarily objective. The systems that underpin his videos involve the entirety of the screen and every edge, while the effect of these systems often spill out of the screen, to illuminate the cinema in remarkable ways. Simon Payne studied at the Kent Institute of Art and Design, Maidstone; Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art and Design, Dundee; and the Royal College of Art, London. As a student, he quickly identified with formal ideas associated with strands in experimental film, but he preferred the immediacy of video, especially when it became digital and facilitated a readily systematic means of dealing with time. His work has shown in numerous festivals and venues including: Anthology Film Archives, New York; Pacific Film Archives, San Francisco; the Ann Arbor Film Festival, the Edinburgh, London and Rotterdam film festivals; Media City Festival, Windsor, Ontario; European Media Arts Festival, Osnabrück; the Serpentine and Whitechapel Galleries in London; Tate Britain and Tate Modern and the State Hermitage Museum in St Petersburg. He has also written widely on experimental film and video and edited four issues of the no.w.here publication Sequence. He co-edited the book Kurt Kren: Structural Films (2016) with Nicky Hamlyn and A.L. Rees and is currently editing a posthumous book by A.L. Rees, entitled Fields of View: Film Art and Spectatorship. Simon Payne is Reader in Film and Media at Anglia Ruskin University, Cambridge and lives and works in London.