Curator
SCOT COTTERELL
Artists
MATT WARREN
NANCY MAURO-FLUDE
KEVIN LEONG
ANDREW HARPER
YASMIN HOLM
EMILE ZILE
Surface
Date: 16-Apr-2005 – 15-May-2005
Location: Contemporary Art Tasmania
This exhibitIon is a result of CAST’S annual Emerging Curator program which exists to support and nurture curatorial practice in Tasmania.
CURATOR’S STATEMENT
As the uses of screen media have proliferated, so too have the ways we represent the world through our screens. The camera, the screen and the computer have become rich fields for artists to explore; a cyclic loop of cross-pollination effecting a constantly evolving electronic media. Because of the generic nature of data and our societal obsession to document and store things, this loop has distorted the trajectory of time as well. Our understanding of history, the present and the future all become part of the same open source of information, ready to be processed and re-presented.
The physical and mental environments we currently inhabit are bursting at the seams with a constant influx. While the gallery space is quite often an antidote to this, a reflective space into which one can retreat, the pieces in Surface have been deprived of this sanctity; their light and sound bleed into each other’s space, competing for sensory attention, mirroring our day-to-day environments.
Through explorations of self, body, representation, texture, content and form, artists till this field while simultaneously sowing the seeds for new hybrids. The contents of the works in Surface are pinned together by their participation in a search to make sense of the world and the medium itself. The gallery and the medium of video act as a central nucleus out of which spews multiple threads or tentacles in various directions, spawning new links and ideas as their paths cross.
The works in Surface process and interpret the terrain of experience and what it is to be here, now, applying these findings onto the most dominant window to the world, the screen surface. While these explorations spiral off in different thematic, aesthetic and poetic directions, their core is the medium of video, and their containing atmosphere is the screen.