My game Touch Love is in the opening show of a new studio/exhibition space in New York. I was probably a bit demanding for small DIY space, but they’re kindly going to the effort of setting it up with two Wii nunchuck controllers instead of a keyboard :)
Here’s a preview of the main work (Play Space) I have in the RMIT Bachelor of Arts (Fine Art) grad. show, opening tomorrow evening (November 27th). I have two spaces, and will be showing Coober Pedy in the other. My spaces are in Building 4, Level 3; one in each room.
I have three paintings from my Revision series in a group exhibition at Brunswick Arts. The show, Gathering Intelligence, runs until this Tuesday Friday, and includes works in several mediums.
Our piece is two videos, both of the last place I lived in, on my last day there. Both were filmed without the other there, or even with knowledge that the other had filmed. So both are natural responses to the leaving of a home, and its transition into someone else’s. They loop, but have different lengths, so there are moments that sit well, and moments that jar, and these change over time.
Andrew David Stapleton’s catalogue essay (archived) makes clear the themes far better than I can, and I will update this post when Blindside’s site has it up.
You can watch Erin’s half of the video on Youtube. One of us will upload the exhibition version once everything’s all up and running. And, now, you can see a 25 minute excerpt of the one we had exhibited, via Erin’s Vimeo account.
Opening night is Thursday, 28th.
In other fine news: I received a globe for my film projector today, and got it all working (after mangling a bit of the Popeye film I ended up with). I’m very, very, much looking forward to uploading all the amateur films I’ve been collecting to Youtube, and Lost Discarded Abandoned.
I finished this installation a few weeks back now. It’s been difficult to document; the video above is my best attempt.
It relates to the collage project I did at the beginning of the year. I had the thought as I was making them that I would like to walk round in these spaces. They worked much better as held objects: I think they are interesting from all angles, and have some nice surprises made-in.
I also connect it to the multimedia course I did when I first left school. I was quickly off-put by the lack of animation involved in computer animation, but fascinated by the building blocks. For those unaware, 3D models are made of polygons, of generally four or three sides. Typically nicely put together to give the illusion of rounded surfaces. More interesting to me were the effects you would get from clipping polygons through each other, the unreal effects from single-sided polygons, all sorts of glitchy, dirty, messy stuff, that reminded me of the beautiful, crude 3D we used to see in videogames.
I’m happy with it. I realised near the end that it was going to be dark (though not quite as dark as in the video) inside, which I hadn’t thought about. I spent most of my time carefully choosing the colour, grain, and texture of the pieces in there, all for little result! But, the effect of the light coming in between the cardboard is a wonderful surprise. I always felt I was working out problems in the same way I would for a drawing, and these lines become something like that. To think I spent so much time trying to fill those gaps! This use of the space between things reminds me of what I was doing with my painting, when the installating wasn’t taking up my painting time.
I’ve been drawing, and am about to start painting, from the structure. (Actually, I’ve been working from the collages too). I want to position people inside, and use the space as an illustration of an internal state. That’s the starting point, anyway.
