Catalogue > At random

Working with a redacted audio recording and transcript of an interview, The Whole Nine Yards explores the cool economy, loneliness and deep exposure of an anonymised New York drug dealer during his incarceration. However, his testimony, far from being police statement or court confession, is gleaned verbatim from a casting audition from a feature film (Good Time, Ben & Josh Safdie 2016) migrated into the project. He is now deceased. The recollections peak during a haunting attempted murder, nine dudes going 'the whole nine yards'. One of two new companion pieces to Intimate Distances (2020), it forms a new body of work that relates to the uneasy rapport between film-making and crime-making. This functions in a space where casting interview and crime testimonial become indiscernible, and can be received as either discarded testimony or audition as witness.

Phillip Warnell is an artist-filmmaker and writer from London, a first generation university graduate from a working class background. He produces cinematic and art works exploring a range of philosophical, poetic and sensorial thematics: ideas on human-animal relations, the political and cinematic imagination, the presence of those with prescient or extraordinary attributes and the poetics of bodily and life-world circumstances. His work is often performative, establishing elements for a film shoot as (part) event, resulting in an interplay between scripted, documented and (sometimes) precarious filming circumstances. Phillip Warnell is an academic, and has undertaken visiting professorships, fellowships and held posts at Harvard University (Film Study Center, 2017-18), Warwick University (UK) Art & History of Medicine, George Mason University (USA), University of Lincoln (UK) and Beijing Normal University (China) amongst others.