| Selected press comment |
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| An English Journey |
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| Thoroughly engrossing mainly due to the artist’s attention to composition and framing, plus his ability to create a feeling of suspense through the simple play between stillness and the expectation of movement. |
| Helen Sumpter– Time Out 15 February 2006 |
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| Andrew Cross’s artwork from the last five years retains an analytical curiosity derived from his previous, successful curatorial career. An English Journey is films and photographs which explore the true façade of the English landscape as it is these days commonly experienced when going about our high-speed travels. The overall impression is of a lush landscape, an awfully malleable and somehow alien world, barely glimpsed beyond the dense and tense networks of international commerce. |
| Richard Clark– The Guardian 2005 |
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| Coming across like a frictionless computer simulation of the driving experience, what [Cross’s] work achieves is a state of suspension, a productive boredom wherein it is possible to stop and consider how social changes (such as globalisation) manifest themselves on the landscape; how the tended earth itself has been, since the advent of agriculture, constantly in a state of Heraclitean flux. |
| Martin Herbert– Tate etc. Summer 2005 |
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| Foreign Power (Beck’s Futures ICA London March – May 2004) |
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Andrew Cross has been a trainspotter since childhood. His digital video Foreign Power is shot beside the tracks of the US rail network. We wait. The camera doesn’t move. The day passes. We are at the mouth of the longest tunnel in the US rail network. Birds sing, insects bat the lens. The black tunnel entrance fogs with smoke. No train comes. Somehow this is interesting; all the waiting and expectation, all that time suspended. In the second scene, the track zooms to a distant vanishing point. The clouds are high, the tress in full summer flush. Eventually something happens – and it is certainly unexpected. The final image is a stalled image, two white wagons frozen on the screen, a second train passing behind.
Watching all this I thought of structuralist film-making of the 1960s and 1970s, and of early cinema – specifically the Lumiere brothers’ 1895 The Arrival of the Train, which had film’s first audience panicking and climbing over their seats in a bid to escape the approaching engine. I also recalled composer Steve Reich’s Different Trains, which like Cross’s Foreign Power is intended as a kind of meditation about where the tracks go and what cargo they carry. In Reich’s work they lead across America , and on, in a cattle truck, to that terrible vanishing point at Auschwitz. As much as waiting for trains in Foreign Power, we are waiting on an event both banal and whose magnitude we cannot grasp. The pictorial qualities of Cross’s work are important too – our place besides the tracks, the blackness of the tunnel’s mouth and where the perspectives lead and mislead us. |
| Adrian Searle – The Guardian 30 March 2004 |
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| My vote goes to Andrew Cross, a real trainspotter-turned-artist, whose films of tracks and tunnels have all the scary, glacial suspense of web-cams. |
| Oliver Bennet – The Observer 28 March 2004 |
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| Cross’s work is clever, cruel and if you hang around lone enough, quite funny. |
| Martin Coomer – Time Out 7 – 14 April 2004 |
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| Andrew Cross takes his camera to the Cascade Mountains near Seattle. But instead of celebrating the sublime, epic grandeur of the countryside, he concentrates on filming the mouth of the longest train tunnel in America. We watch with him, waiting for a locomotive to erupt from the darkness. Although smoke seeps from the tunnel, only a distant6 unidentifiable sound can be heard. Cross calls the three-part work Foreign Power suggesting imminent invasion. And the sense of expectancy he creates in each sinister sequence becomes almost unendurable by the end. |
| Richard Cork – New Statesman 12 April 2004 |
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| Andrew Cross takes us into arenas more mundane. His work looks at railway lines in the US, mixing almost resentfully artful scenes of stillness with sudden images of industry; train-spottingly insipid yet somehow quite brilliant. |
| Huw Lewis Jones – Varsity April 2004 |
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| Andrew Cross in his short films made on the US rail network, transposes the notion of waiting and travel into a formal proposition. Mechanical sound becomes musical, direction and speed a vector within a drawing and a tunnel full of smoke a living painting with obvious art-historical provenance. Anticipation, a well-wielded video-art tool, is not so infuriating in this instance, as we accept it as a meditative, even literary, aspect of travel. |
| Sally O’Reilly – Modern Painters Summer 2004 |
