Sue Healey - On View

SUE HEALEY On View 19 March to 14 April 2016

Sue Healey, Nalina Wait, and Raghav Handa, performing at Brenda May Gallery, 19 March 2016

SUE HEALEY On View 19 March to 14 April 2016

The On View series (2013 - present) is concerned with the acts of seeing and being seen. Inspired by the embodied awareness of the dance performer, the works seamlessly combine dance and film to interrogate ideas about identity and the moving body. Four glimpses of this work can be seen at Brenda May Gallery.

Sue Healey, ‘On View: The Dancers Speak’ 2016, 3 channel installation - 20mins

“Inherently unstable – the body is always in a paradoxical state of becoming – and becoming undone.”

Ann Cooper Albright The body, intimately implicated in our notions of identity, is in constant flux. A digital portrait of the body is also fundamentally about movement - a subtle shaping and shifting, in space and through time. We morph and manipulate our selves, adding and shedding layers, reconstituting, transforming. The dance artist has peculiar powers to articulate this, through a kinaesthetic and somatic awareness, and a keen attentiveness to seeing and being seen.

Dance, as an art-form, is dynamic and ephemeral - gone in the blink of an eye. A digital portrait, in contrast, is a tangible artefact. You can witness it again and again. Yet, the technology when compared to a painted portrait, can also be seen as inherently unstable and dynamic - with its rapidly firing data, pixels and frames. The moving digital portrait is therefore a paradox, disappearing and appearing, in flux and solid. I work within the space of these oppositions. Identity is elusive.

In this work, dance artist Nalina reveals a meticulous, morphing body, constantly negotiating an unstable world. She is constantly becoming.

Sue Healey, ‘On View: Nalina’ 2016, 2 channel video - 6:06mins, edition of 8

Biography A multi-award winning choreographer, educator, filmmaker and installation artist, Sue Healey is one of Australia’s foremost dance makers and widely regarded as one of the region’s finest dance-filmmakers.

Originally from New Zealand, she was a founding member of the Melbourne company Dance Works and Artistic Director of Vis-à-Vis Dance (1993-96). Sue received the prestigious Creative Fellowship in 2013-14 from the Australia Council for Arts, and was recently made an Honorary Fellow of the Victorian College of the Arts, University of Melbourne. With her own Sue Healey Company, she has made and toured numerous dance works for theatres, galleries, specific sites and screens across Australia, USA, Europe and Asia.

Her films have screened in over 30 countries and have been broadcast by Australian and European television networks. Virtuosi (her debut feature-length documentary) has screened in New York, Montreal, Amsterdam, Prague, Portugal, London, American Dance Festival and many other international festivals in 2013-15. Virtuosi won an Australian Dance Award for Outstanding Achievement in Dance on Film 2013 and a Silver ACS Award for cinematography (feature film).

Healey creates choreography and film for a diverse range of companies and contexts. Recent projects include: film/visual design for White Cloud for singer Tim Finn; film for Red Shoes, Expressions Dance Company Brisbane; Double Entendre and Narcissus, two commissions from The Australia Ensemble, Sydney; Luminocity, a large scale site specific for the Faculty of the Built Environment UNSW; The Golds, a documentary about a company of dancers aged 55-90 years.

Her series On View is currently being presented in various contexts around Australia: On View: Quintet toured to Dance Massive Festival in Melbourne, March 2015 On View: Benjamin Hancock as part of the Gertrude St Projection Festival, Melbourne.

The major work On View: Live Portraits was presented by Performance Space at Carriageworks, Sydney in July 2015, in conjunction with the installation On View: Icons – Dame Lucette Aldous and Professor Shirley McKechnie.

A large scale version of On View is now in development for West Kowloon Cultural District in Hong Kong.

Sue Healey, ‘The Door, the Chair, the Bed and the Stair’ 2009, video - 9:24mins

Sue Healey, ‘Super 8 Sketches’ 2016, 2 channel installation - 3:41mins

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