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Greenland

media
posted on 2019-01-30, 00:00 authored by Cameron BishopCameron Bishop, Simon Reis
Greenland

History

Location

Trocadero

Start date

2019-01-30

End date

2019-02-15

Language

eng

Research statement

Greenland immerses the audience in a history of seeing, and recognises that we are in a transformative moment in the subject’s orientation to the world, to the state, and the mechanisms we represent ourselves in (from the digital to gallery and public spaces). Using digital and green screen technologies we capture the audience in a re-conditioned, animated Tom Roberts painting insinuating the individual into a simulated Australia – separating out the head and the body. It makes plain our relations to surveillance culture and suggests that the digital allows us to exist simultaneously in many places at once, all invented spaces, and existing nowhere. The green screen is the foundation for this nowhere space – as the artist and writer, Hito Steyerl has suggested. With the green screen cone we lure the participants into a headless becoming – whereby the thinking is split from the doing. In stepping into the space the participant becomes both the oppressor and the oppressed – both an active agent in the scene, and an also-ran trapped in the eternal present. Using OBS software and sensor technologies the Tom Roberts animated work is progressively added to over the course of the day. With each person that enters the green screen, placing their head in the portal, the animated Roberts work appropriates and remediates the viewer, whose body is fixed into the scene and dealt with as if they were merely an object. Bishop & Reis build on our collaborative practice of over 14 years as we become more explicit in the questions we ask of the gallery goer and public art participant. Implicit in the work is a critique of the gallery and its use value – this played out in the big-screen narrative behind the sculptural installation. Trocadero is an established artist run gallery in Melbourne renowned for its support of experimental art and performance.

Publication classification

JO1 Original Creative Works – Visual Art Work

Scale

NTRO Minor

Extent

4 x MP4 files, 5 photographs, 1 x PDF

Event

Greenland

Publisher

Trocadero Gallery

Place of publication

Melbourne, Vic.