A fixed frame depicts a courtyard at night.  The space is at once interior and exterior; a walled room  that is outside a building but enclosed by it.   Like the classic stage or film set the frame pictures a three sided space,  which is viewed from  the perspective of a transparent fourth wall. The tungsten lights which illuminate the yard accentuate a doorway and window which opens on it,  a dustbin, some potted plants which move gently in the breeze.  In the middle of the image a large penetrably dark square registers a passageway which gives onto the street outside.  The architecture and lighting of the scene suggest  the yard as a kind stage   - a space consumed the sense of expectation it provokes.

 The 6 minute film records the duration of an apparent  rainstorm  in the courtyard which starts suddenly just after the beginning of the film and stops equally abruptly just before its end.  Though peripheral activity occurs within the frame; a figure passing through the yard, a door opening and closing again,  the rainstorm is the event, the drama  and the story of the film. 

 As the torrential rain pours through the 6 minutes of the work the sense of the tension, expectation and affect that it evokes increases.  The  intensity of the scenario increases not because the storm becomes more violent but through the cumulative nature of the way that one experiences something through time. 

 The rainstorm in YARD  is no natural occurrence but a carefully orchestrated event, stage-managed with an elaborate but low-tech arrangement of pipes of the sort used by early Hollywood filmmakers. The large water droplets flash white in the lights as they fall in a two dimensional curtain across the foreground of the image of the yard.   In this way the pathos of the attempt to imitate the phenomena of rain becomes part of the work. In this act of imitation YARD  refers to the literary, painterly and filmic allusions which such a rainstorm can conjure up; an image of melancholy, melodrama or waste.

Exhibitions of the film include:
‘Sodium Dreams’, CCS Museum, Bard College, New York State 2003. ‘Shimmering Substance’ Bristol/ Cornerhouse, curated by Barry Schwabsky & Catsou Roberts cManchester 2002. Centro Galego D’Arte Contemporanae, Santiago di Compostella, Spain 2001. Sarah Dobai, Palacio Abrantes, Salamanca, Spain 2001. YARD, Platform, Wilkes Street, London E2 2001.

Catalogue from Shimmering Substance & View Finder exhibition at Artnolfini, Bristol & Cornerhouse, Manchester. curated by Barry Schwabsky, Stephen Hepworth and Catsou Roberts, explores the elusive nature of materiality. Includes the work of Mel Bochner, Tom Chamberlain, Sarah Dobai, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Alexis Harding, Roger Hiorns, Rachel Howard, Marilyn Minter, David Musgrave, Ernesto Neto, Lawson Oyekan, Rudolf Stingel, Lawrence Weiner and Pae White. The book is available via Abe Books:

https://www.abebooks.com/first-edition/Arnolfini-Bristol-Shimmering-Substance-April-June/22848462088/bd#&gid=1&pid=1