Quiet, contemplative and immersive, Australian Landscapes is a digital video installation that invites your imagination. It evokes memories of quiet moments in inland Australia, when you become absorbed in the visual richness of surface details. Very slowly, the work reveals a delicacy of detail and a harshness of ground so characteristic of the Australian inland.
This exhibition highlights the variety and inventiveness of professional artists who live and work in Canberra. It includes works in a wide range of media, from embroidery to digital animation. Each work in the exhibition draws on material from a local collection of cultural material. Each celebrates an aspect of the lives and experiences of real Canberrans, people who have worked, raised families, played sport, made art and created communities, unaffected by the antics of the fly-in-fly-out politicians whose pronouncements are routinely attributed to a mythical ‘Canberra’.
For several years I’ve photographed partially reflective surfaces (ponds, windows, billabongs, spectacles…). Ambiguities result—not ambiguities constructed but ambiguities revealed—ambiguities that give voice to opposites. Partial reflections reveal both connections and contradictions between opposite viewpoints. And Haefliger Cottage breathes contradictions.
Originally Haefliger Cottage was an unassuming dwelling for a miner; now it bears a heavy load of history. It’s twisted with age. Nothing’s quite square. Nothing quite joins. Time has allowed a liquid flow of glass in the panes of the windows and the bookcase. The thicknesses of glass have become uneven and the panes now distort every view (just a little) and every reflection (just a little more). Reflections on Haefliger’s Cottage is a collection of these views and reflections. All faithful, none true.
Slow, quirky and very Canberra, Untitled Moments is a digital animation based on embroidery.
Untitled Moments is a collaborative project exploring the visual impact of embroidery and photography in a digital animation. We’ve used digital technologies to combine images and sound to create narrative fragments—imagined incidents drawn from our observations of Canberra’s most unremarkable moments.
The resulting work does not attempt to mimic cartoons or conventional animations. It’s a pastiche, an idiosyncratic mixture of embroidery, drawing, watercolour, photography, scanography, digital animation, field recordings and digitally generated sounds. The final effect is sometimes contemplative, sometimes deliberately cheesy.
Art Machine is an exploration into the boundaries between digital art, code art and new media installation.
What exactly constitutes an artwork—the intent of the artist, the materials used in the production, the mode of presentation, the experience of the viewer? Art Machine aims to explore these notions by staging an exhibition where artistic intent, content, production materials and final presentation of an artwork operate independently of each other and yet combine to create an art experience.
Art Machine will pit locally coded digital art machines against text, images, video and sound submitted by you via Art Machine’s 24/7 online submission system—artmachine.tv.
Art Machine is accepting submissions, so browse to artmachine.tv and contribute your text, image, video and sound—your digital submissions will form the backbone of this unique exhibition and art experience.
Hill Endis a massive work of fiction, a story-telling project spanning generations. It is more than a place—it is a dense web of images, narrative, mythology; a site of contested meaning. Frames of Reference is an exhibition of photographs of Hill End from 1872 to 2005. It features the work of Russell Drysdale, Beaufoy Merlin, and 11 contemporary photographers—Alison Bennett, Tim Brook, Dacchi Dang, Sarah-Mace Dennis, Brett Hilder, Svenja Kratz, Cathy Laudenbach, Heidrun Lohr, Catherine Rogers, Greg Weight and Glenn Woodley.
Fat Gods, Skinny Gods considers the influence of adult-created myths on young people in the process of finding a balance between fantasy (how life could be) and reality (how it is).
The material for Fat Gods, Skinny Gods was developed from many weeks of group discussion and workshopping. It was my task to find the appropriate images and language to express what was often an emotional feeling of the individuals or group.
In so doing, I did not attempt to dilute these emotions. What is presented intends to reflect what very often is a ploy (unintentional or not?) by society to deceive us into believing that a brighter tomorrow can be bought on a time plan.
Fat Gods, Skinny Gods is presented as a piece of symbolic, hopefully provocative, theatre—interweaving a well-known fairy story with contemporary reality. Like the majority of our productions at TAU, it is an original, group-devised work, which is developed from a long and demanding workshop process involving considerable risk.
We hope you find the performance stimulating.
Domenic Mico
