GALLERY 1

Video Time

Tim Silver, Kate Murphy, Pete Volich, Guy Benfield, Jacky Redgate Mitch Cairns curated by Abigail Moncrieff

Video Time is a playful moving image exhibition that focuses upon the medium of video and film and its links to an artist’s conceptual practice. It considers the way individual artists have used video as a document or recording device for an ephemeral moment or environment, and how they interpret televisual culture and the conventions of the cinematic documentary format. Works are also situated in the context of the artists’ wider practice, including painting, sculpture or photography.

Video Time presents works dating from 1978 to four new works made for the exhibition by artists such as Pete Volich and Guy Benfield. It encompasses a variety of formats, from Super 8 and VHS to current high-definition digital video.

Jacky Redgate is showing a selection of early works, including documentation of a performance installation entitled “Chicken Dinner”, 1978 and four hand crafted Super 8 films with sound which the artist recently transferred to DVD. With titles such as "Wedding Wishes", 1979 and "My First Pony", 1980, the films were last screened in 1979 - 1983 in programmes such as the South Australian Young Film-makers' Festival, Adelaide, Women's Art Movement Film Group, Adelaide and the Melbourne Fringe Arts Festival, Fringe Network Film and Video.

Tim Silver is exhibiting a documentation of a performative object, a 3D sculpture of a jigsaw piece formed from the artists’ own blood and then frozen. This 20-minute time-lapse video documents the object, placed on a plinth, melting in real time throughout the artists’ exhibition opening in 1997.
Mitch Cairns’ work shows the artist dancing in a handmade potato suit against a painted architectural background, dancing a minimalist version of an Irish jig, Linking the current economic times with a potential downturn in the artists’ subjectivity, Cairns “recession video” could either be a funerary tune or a dance of union. At the very least, some kind of insurance.

Kate Murphy’s new work observes a morning ritual of prayer and movement performed by students at an Australian primary school. This work continues Murphy's interest in the relationship between the camera, the performer and the viewer. Kate Murphy's work was commissioned by ReelDance.

PHOTOGRAPHY BY JAMIE NORTH

Covers is part of an ongoing investigation into the mythology of the artist. It arises from my fascination with the cult of celebrity in art; how certain artists and certain works are (and are not) inscribed into the canon of art history, and more importantly, how such historicisations are then legitimized. In a similar manner, the Covers paintings analyze and imitate the repetition of “buzzwords” used in contemporary art (particular to the covers of art journals) and their likeness to fashion fads. Certain words and ideas come into vogue, and the artists who deal in their currency are labeled as the next “hot thing”. Yet, as with the cycles of fashion, this prominence is transient. In this sense, Covers is a playful critique of the infrastructures and institutions that inform contemporary arts practice, such as the art market and the contemporary art publication.

image: Cover 5