Don Bury, Lisa Fielding-Smith, Johannes Maier, Aran Mann, Ben Pruskin
1 June - 1 July 2001
We are pleased to announce a show of the most recent video work on offer. Five new artists working exclusively with video draw on the tenets of the origins of 1960's and 1970's video art and the conceptual and political contexts the medium first emerged from. Though a post-MTV generation the artists look to this early sovereignty of video for a tool for investigation and an alternative to painting and sculpture, rather than embracing new technologies. Key aspects of documentation, gender, personal politics and performance, are utilised around awareness of media saturation, bi-way sexuality and seminal film theory.
In Don Bury's film putatively inherent homoeroticism is distilled from the edict of mainstream cinema, while Johannes Maier turns the camera onto the apparatus of the gallery system and the interpersonal axis between dealer and artist, affording brief glimpses of the sometimes delicate and rarely contemplated relationship between maker and promoter. History integral to the identity and form of video is prominent in all the short spanning films and, the sometimes, low-tech appropriation and delivery of imagery. Sound, also, plays a prominent role in all the final edits, especially in Aran Mann's faintly dark, girl underwater dreamland and Lisa Fielding-Smith teases out sexual ambiguities and disclosure against a hissing playback. Ben Pruskin's scripted text animation gives Lawrence Weiner and other text artists a subtly grotesque reworking.
Each artist is working in a tight 3 - 5 minute time frame for the exhibition - though all the works derive from a lengthier program and body of work. Also, because of special time editing and looping for the show only one piece will play at a time, allowing each piece to hold the gallery for that piece only, with a countdown to the waiting films displayed on the respective monitors and screens when not in use.
All the artists are newcomers to the public though Don Bury, Johannes Maier and Ben Pruskin exhibited as part of New Contemporaries 2000.
Ben Pruskin
Melancholy Story 2001
video, 5 mins looped
Ben Pruskin
Melancholy Story 2001
video, 5 mins looped