Billy Sassi

Working across photography, filmmaking and sculpture, Billy Sassi’s work seeks to ignite a sense of connection between viewers and images. His films and photographs explore ideas of performance and difficulty, while igniting conversations surrounding the requests spectators and images make of one another and the dynamics of looking and being looked at.

 

His film and photography pieces lean towards the theatrical, featuring very deliberate uses of staging; gesture and pose. His exhibition works often combine still and moving images into one cohesive whole, opening dialogues around the impact of duration while exploring the potential for tensions between these interconnected media. His process involves the creation of numerous sets, props and costumes, typically fabricated by hand and invested in notions of craftmanship; his recent films have featured sunflower fields constructed from paper and cardboard Romanesque columns.  

 

He is also very interested in the material properties of images and image-making technologies; their texture; and their relationship with performing bodies. He experiments with multiple processes including analogue film-making, slide photography and the use of hand-made pinhole cameras.