REVIEW: Sortie- Claire Anna Watson

‘Sortie’ is Watsons beautiful and disturbing large scale video work, a work that resembles both clinical-analysis, video documentation and luscious, flesh-torture porn.

The viewer is greeted with the organically rounded lush, red pyramid, spot lit against a background of darkness, theatrically centre-stage, an inanimate actor delivering a silent monologue. After a moment we become aware that this object before us is a strawberry, vibrant and swollen, a ripe fertile goddess.

Cue the horror: a pair of surgical grade tweezers enters stage left, guided by an unseen operator, begins to slowly peck away at a seed. The neutering of just one of so many other seeds appears as random cruelty without reason or justification. Eventually, the unknown antagonist is successful; the seed is plucked from the flesh and withdraws into the darkness. Violence magnified.

The tweezers return under the still, emotionless eye of the video camera, ready to strike again. The action is repeated: the live abortion of one of the possible hundreds, or thousands of tiny cocooned life-forms (seeds), clinging and imbedded to the parental, defenceless life support system, shot in high definition.

One by one, meticulously, slowly, patiently, the off screen perpetrator assaults the fruit until it has no possible chance of it progeny. With the seeds removed, it’s at this point that the real horror begins. The maligned metal pincers return, with the task of seed removal accomplished, they mechanically turn on the strawberry itself, tearing apart flesh and form, masticating what is solid and releasing, the berrys thick, viscous, oozing innards.

Sortie is a crime against nature on the tiniest scale, against one the of smallest most defenceless victims, but every violent detail is amplified. Claire Anna Watson makes Dario Argento wish that he was a greengrocer.

Things I Wish I'd Known- West Space

"Things I wish I’d known"
Ross Coulter, Melody Ellis, Brad Haylock, Veronica Kent, Sanné Mestrom, Lillian O’Neil, Patrick Pound, Ben Sheppard, Utako Shindo, Tai Snaith, Kieran Stewart and Dominic Redfern, with essays by Phip Murray and Kelly Fliedner
West Space
6 November - 28 November 2009

What would you do differently if you had your time over? Many people will say ‘nothing’ in defence of their impeccable past choices, but i think that it is okay to be wrong. ‘Things I Wish I’d Known’ is a group of works that hone in on this lament of hindsight.

Ross Coulters video work (above), ‘The 2007 VCA Graduation Video’ recalls a dream Coulter had in which an art mascot, or ‘the coach’, berates him, and in turn, the viewer with moral boosting affirmations, en masse, on loop.

Tai Snaiths collages meld short personal proverbs of advice ( ‘get over yourself’ and ‘go into yourself’) with a literal, visual translation of the phrase ‘double vision in hindsight’ by adding an extra pair of eyes to black and white fashion portrait photography from a past era, allowing the subject to see the future in colour, and supposedly twice as well.

Brad Haylock states that whatever you expect, will surely always end up coming to fruition, and resulting in disappointment, in his case, marching in the streets and getting nothing but a lousy placard.

Melody Ellis passes on her thoughts to the audience, in the form of small cards with a single instruction or piece of advice on each that the audience is invited to take. As opposed to having the cards printed, Ellis has typed them out herself using a typewriter onto the coloured card, thus reliving her own advice in the repetitious act of typing and also demanding she type it correctly; there is no room for error using a typewriter and coloured card.

This is the 'advice for those undertaking a BFA’ exhibition. Good luck in your future pursuits exhibiting artists, your past selves did okay knowing what they did.

http://www.westspace.org.au/program/things-i-wish-i-d-known.html

art crush- Oliver Laric

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5wNZZIqxYyQ

ToonaParstaBongMyst- Simon McGlinn

"ToonaParstaBongMyst"
Simon McGlinn
West Space
6 November - 28 November 2009

How it all works is a big joke. On entering the gallery to view McGlinns ‘ToonaParstaBongMyst’ at West Space, the viewer encounters a seemingly minimal installation of three video works shown on TVs sitting (meditating? drug affected?) on the floor. Each different, seemingly without connection despite sharing an off-beat, slightly bleak humour and that each video is named after its duration in minutes and seconds. The three video works are all short, almost seamlessly looped, and convey their message regardless of whether they’re viewed for a second or their entirety (perfect for our generations attention spans that have been raped by 30 second advertising, bite-size youtube clips and sugary, gurana infused energy drinks). McGlinn uses the repetitive nature of the videoworks, which is usually common in works of this type, to highlight the bleakly humourous nature of the redundant, incessant echoing actions of a satirical, Sisyphean nature.

Each work features a single focus or feature: Wide-eyed eyeballs floating in a black void, the planet earth spinning in outerspace, and the coming and goings of urban dwellers in a street over 24 hours. The featured subjects can be simplified to be representative of: god (or some divine being who exists as crazy excitable planet sized eyes darting around in an abyss), our planet (as spaceship, home, vessel, bio-sphere), humanity (temporary, mortal, creatures of habit and familiarity). Humanity habitats the Earth, Earth exists in space and god is all. McGlinn makes a mockery of all three. The all seeing eyes, gods embodiment hover peacefully in a starless vacuum, without warning they become comically frenetic, darting about, crossing each other’s paths, no longer respected but certifiably idiotic. The earth itself is viewed from afar, an indeterminate speck among the stars and as we zoom in on this life harboring vessel turning on its axis we realize it is a charade, a cheap parody of our planet, a plastic dime-store globe. Not even our existence is spared from the cynicsm of McGlinns observation, he depicts us in a generic pixilated town akin to an 80’s video game, coming and going, seemingly without purpose, day in day out, trapped in a futile existence.

A lot of McGlinn’s work (including that which he does with collaborative ‘Greatest Hits’) seems to be about taking a format, a blueprint, a procedure, an underlying structure of how a certain system, tradition or concept works, goes by and then subverting it, debasing it, either by highlighting its simplicity, mocking its authority by representing it in low-fi reproduction and or materiality.

There is a subtle fourth work in the gallery, an installation work that can be easily missed because of the dominance of the video works, a single nail at average viewing height in the middle of an unused wall, rotating slowly in the vast white painted space, mirroring our planet, hanging in a black abyss, turning fruitless, seemingly without purpose, as meaningless as an illogical god, a planets orbit or our own limited mortal lives.

ON NOW- Playheads- Alliance Fracaise Gallery

“Playheads”
Santina Amato, Ross Coulter, Amelia Johannes, Kiera Brew Kurec, Ben Millar
Alliance Francaise gallery
08 May -04 June 2008

ON NOW

“Playheads” is a group exhibition of artist’s producing video art selected from the 2007 VCA graduate exhibition. Their treatment of video as a medium varies greatly between them and “the artists have each developed a distinctive language, and the coexistance of their work in the same space is an experience in itself” (Patrice Pauc 2008).

The video work can act as a recording device, evidence of objects in space and time. Ben Millar’s work examines this but extends on this concept further by employing more objects into the ‘real space’ in which the video is being shown, thus creating more folds and dialogues between both the real objects in real space and those captured within the recording.

Amelia Johannes puts the focus on a number of different forms of video utilising the projection of stills and running film with both the superior, digital, video projectors and their out-dated, predecessors, the humble slide projectors. She incorporates objects into the work but unlike Ben Millar’s almost field-study type arrangement of objects, Amelia uses more emotive objects: old, wooden drawers, overturned cupboards and broken, obsolete TV set’s.

The drama of the common television set is Ross Coulter’s medium for his own self-stared video work. We follow Coulter from scene to scene in which he is always on the phone, informing the unknown caller of his current (and soon to change) location. Through the power of editing the journey we only see him at a destination, forever being chased by the caller, never meeting.

Live drama played out s performance to accompany video saw Kiera Brew-Kurec wearing white fabric dress continually washing and hanging indescript laundry in a viscous pepetual cycle of the mundane chore outside the window of the gallery space. Her work erring in-between a space of being of either a suggestive nature or a little disturbing. In one of the two, she washes herself from a bowl with soap, performing directly in front of the camera, before attempting to eat the soap with water whilst singing in an operatic style. The result, her gargled singing and inevitable spewing forth a thick soapy mess seems to bare an uncomfortable connection to the torturous nature of niche, oral-sex pornography.

Santina Amato’s, work draws the view into the drama that can be produced with video and the employment of the space. To view Amato’s work the view must engage with it by viewing through a keyhole, forcing the audience to physically enact a popular action of curiosity repeated throughout film history. With this kind of limited view space, the audience has a unique and personal connection to the work, being one-on-one, one-at-a-time, even though everyone see’s the same thing.

The show with the variety of works succeeds at not being just another “screen-show” and legitimately explores the possibility of video art highlighting considerations of display scale, method or medium of display, viewer interactivity, and the combination of accompanying theatrical elements such as props (objects) and live performance. Seeing “playheads” is made very easy as the gallery’s opening hours are generous (Mon-Thur: 9:00am-8:30pm, Fri: 9:00am-6:00pm and Sat: 9:00am-4:30pm) as opposed to the limited opening hours of some volunteer-dependent ARI’s and student galleries.

http://afmelbourne.asn.au/