Saturday, December 04, 2004
[Six] Artists Selected for the Anne Landa Exhibition [Australia]
Six young and innovative artists have been selected for the inaugural Anne Landa Exhibition and Award - the first award exhibition in Australia for moving image and new media work. The award has been established in honour of Anne Landa, a Trustee of the Art Gallery of New South Wales who died in 2002. This is the first in a biennial series of exhibitions, each with an acquisitive award of $25,000.
[snip]
Van Sowerwine’s engaging animated girl invites us to play with her at a tea-party. As you interact with her screen image she responds to your suggestions, but playtime unfortunately becomes sinister as each decision you make on the doll’s behalf has consequences. David Rosetzky’s confessional videos consider how we represent our lives to ourselves and how our experience of self is affected by relationships with others. In Untouchable we look into three rooms whose inhabitants speak about an emotionally charged experience that is preoccupying them.
A subtle politics infuses Peter Hennessey’s digital animation of the Voyager space probe and soundtrack of messages recorded for anyone in outer space who may encounter the voyager, greetings from earth to aliens. Guy Benfield constructs room environments and in a mock-ironic reprise of 70s performance art, he pours, splashes and rolls around in paint to make visceral, humourous, sexually charged art works recorded on video and played back in the final gallery installation.
Craig Walsh’s projections of surprising images onto the Gallery’s architecture confuse what the mind knows and what the eyes sees. A poetic beauty haunts Shaun Gladwell’s low-fi videos of skateboarders, bike riders and break dancers as they take ownership of urban spaces, even momentarily, suggesting alternate ways in which we can we can live in a highly regulated physical environment.