The Lumière Project by Dan McDermott is based on a 60 second film shot by the Lumière brothers in 1895. The film shows a train pulling into a station in France and people entering and alighting from a station platform. It is his fascination with this brief piece of history which led McDermott to conceive The Lumière Project, an all consuming artistic investigation into the act of experiencing a past moment in the ‘here and now.'

McDermott's exhibition envelopes High House Gallery across an ambitiously varied range of media and scale. Vast seductive canvases depicting stills from the film sit alongside delicate etchings, photographs and re-appropriated versions of the original moving picture, all inviting an array of perspectives from which to experience this 60 seconds of time belonging to the past.

It is McDermott's sleek and glossy oil paintings which dominate the gallery space. Each piece displays a fresh and subtle abstract development in the artist's signature photorealist style. The highlights are three unconventionally shaped canvases which shrewdly create the illusion that one is standing within the artist's painted scene. For a fleeting second it is possible to believe we are fellow passengers on the station platform in France, existing alongside the Lumière brothers' protagonists.

The star of the show, the Lumière film itself, is hidden from immediate view. Presented within a heavy wooden viewing box (referencing an early Victorian mutoscope) the film can only be viewed isolated on a tiny screen within the black interior space of the box. McDermott has consciously separated the film from the surrounding gallery. With a museum-like quality, the mutoscope box plays the film as though in a miniature cinema space and to look through the eye piece is to be immediately taken back to the moment in time when the scene first unfolded.

Over two small rooms, laid out like the pages of a sketch book, The Lumière Project invites us to step inside a series of past moments: the moment the Lumière brothers' film was first conceived and the numerous moments of the film which the artist has revisited. McDermott's deep reflections expressed in oil, photography, film and ink have together transformed High House Gallery into a place of transition which exists neither in the past nor in the present.

The Lumière Project continues at High House Gallery until 6 October 2013.