becoming [in]determinate

The exhibition began with a text by Naarm based artist, curator and writer Abbra Kotlarczyk. Five creative practitioners then responded to this text-based creative work, crafting films that unpack these dynamic concepts. The films produced suggest an immediate awareness of temporal life; that we are immersed in time as flow and that the residues of our lived processes are collections of materialised and spatialised time.

Read the text In Material Per Versions Part II by Abbra Kotlarczyk.

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Mitch Goodwin, RGB Dreams, 2019, digital moving image, 5:59 min

Truth, lies and screen time in the city :: A glimpse of the ambiguous and the synthetic - post-truth image making on the network :: Improbable cyborgs meet CGI models and cheeky chat bots :: Tweets, clowns and avatars burning red, green and blue :: Meanwhile, the city shimmers and the pixels blink as the robot in the garden downloads an update and ... waits.

Joe Hamilton, Cézanne Unfixed, 2018, digital moving image, 4:16 min, Ed.25

In Cézanne Unfixed, the relationship between the painting and the museum is reconfigured. The brushstrokes of Cézanne’s paintings break from their canvases to inhabit the spatial dimensions of the museum while the architecture is flattened on to the surface of the image plane. Old barriers dissolve as new barriers are created. In his time, Cézanne was influenced by developments in science to challenge the ways of modelling space and volume, this artwork continues on that path.

Sharni Hodge, SO, SO, SO, ISO, 2019, video, 3:48min. Sound Design & Mix by Henry Pyne.

Shifting between point-of-view recordings and lo-fi remodelling, stagnant spaces too often deemed as a weight on progress, become immortalised through her moving image works. As the post-production process fosters familiarity, localised time or place begins to transcend in the screen whilst tending to the space. Fetishised, like a love note equivalent of empty export cans finding each other in the corners of the very same spaces, the work is then offered up as travelogues for the viewer.

Eugenia Lim, Windows, 2016, HD video, silent, 2:55 min.

Windows explores the proliferation, dissemination and simulation of images in our globalised, digitised age. The work references Rene Magritte's 'Not to be Reproduced' (1937), compositing Eugenia's performance persona 'the Ambassador' onto stock footage of tourists taking in the monuments of global tourism at the 'Windows of the World' and 'The World' theme parks in China. In an age when mass tourism and digital photography can place us anywhere in the real or virtual world, arguably, cultural stereotypes, xenophobia and nationalism are as strong as ever. The selfie-stick has become the ubiquitous symbol and symptom of our age of self-documentation, self-aggrandisement and digitally disseminated narcissism. Does the self-portrait still wield power in the age of the self-stick?

Nick Rebstadt, Flat Poche, 2019, digital video, 6;15 min.

‘Poche’ (pronounced ‘poe-shay’) is an architectural term that refers to the thickness of a wall. Incidentally the word also sounds like ‘posh’. Flat Poche is a voyeuristic wash of luxury high-end interior ‘artist impressions’ filmed on-site that are yet to be built and will never be inhabited in the ways depicted. Idealistic, vague and slightly painterly – in symbolism, composition and technique – the images express a zeitgeist of now, where an image of interior, a phantasmagoria of dwelling, is so deeply connected to our identity both personally and culturally (and can also be bought off-plan).