Horton Gallery, Chelsea is pleased to announce A Film by Jesus Rinzoli, its first solo exhibition by London-based artist Jamie Shovlin. The exhibition will feature a projected video running approximately 77 minutes as well as the film’s script and advertisements.

Examining the degree to which a film director – or artist – has control over their works’ intended message, meaning and historical legacy, A Film by Jesus Rinzoli explores the inherent tension within processes of collaboration and adaptation in any creative endeavour. The exhibited works are taken from the ongoing Hiker Meat Project (2009-). The project is a partial adaptation of an earlier work, Lustfaust: A Folk Anthology 1976-81 (2003-6), an archive of material from the fans and musicians of a fictional German band. At that project’s periphery was a narrative sketch for the exploitation film Hiker Meat – for which the band composed a soundtrack – and these notes are taken as a starting point for the larger Hiker Meat Project, presented here as a work in progress.

Intended as both homage and deconstruction of the 1970/80s exploitation era of film and as well as a celebration of the relationship between the audio and the visual within the genre, the project originates from a rough-cut film, derived from the initial narrative sketch, based on imagined director Jesus Rinzoli’s vision for Hiker Meat. This is produced by collaging over 1000 clips of found footage, each from a film produced during this notorious period.

The creation of the collaged film is the first in a number of interrelated processes that will see the development of a new screenplay and soundtrack for Hiker Meat with a number of film posters and script variations, each repositioning the narrative of the film according to a specific language and its implied associative social, political and historical concerns. These variations, represented here by film posters and scripts for the Italian, Spanish and American – Hiker Meat – cuts of the film, are subsequently woven into a faux historical timeline for the film and its troubled production and distribution.

Jamie Shovlin is interested in the tension between truth and fiction, reality and invention, history and memory. He is an artist whose work combines extraordinary facility as a draughtsman, printmaker, painter and writer with conceptual complexity and playfulness. His painstakingly researched and executed works merge inherently flawed systems, pseudo-scientific exactitude and doubtful philosophical propositions with the seemingly objective experience of the archive. Through his projects Shovlin questions how information becomes authoritative and explores the way that we map and classify the world in order to understand it.

Jamie Shovlin (b. 1978, England) lives and works in London. He received a MA from the Royal College of Art and a BA from Loughborough University School of Art & Design. He has been featured in solo exhibitions at the Tate Britain, London; Contemporary Art Museum, (MACRO) Rome; and at Haunch of Venison in London, Berlin, and Zurich, where he is represented. His work has been seen previously in New York at James Cohan, Artist’s Space, and Freight + Volume.