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The artist and filmmaker explores representation in culture
Rhea Storr is an artist and filmmaker who explores the representation of Black and mixed-race people in culture. Masquerade and subversion are ongoing themes in Rhea’s work, as is the effect of place or space on cultural representation particularly as a metaphor for protest. The artist’s rural upbringing and mixed British Bahamian heritage informs much of her work.
In her film The Image That Spits, The Eye That Accumulates, a mixed-race body explores a Norfolk landscape threatened by coastal erosion. The physical erosion of the landscape mirrors the now obsolete Kodachrome film she uses, once hailed as the new archival film for its vibrant colours. The film stock itself is now only able to be developed in black and white but the artist has been able to restore colour to the film through a convoluted process of coloured filters giving a ghostly veneer as anything that moves does not retain its proper colour.
Rhea’s 2017, 23-minute film explores the defining line between an embodied camera or a passive observer, where the images are inadequate as they too erode. As the artist has stated. “History is for those who have the means to fix themselves.”
