Screen Romance

04.03.2015 – 21.03.2015 Yvette Hamilton Finn Marchant Erin O’Sullivan Brandon Rahme Nicholas Shearer Curated by Luke Letourneau

SCREEN ROMANCE

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Romancing the Screen The screen is fluid. It occupies a hybrid position in our everyday. It is both a desirable object and a window into an imagined elsewhere. There is no separation between the illusionistic space of the screen and the position from which we navigate.

‘Screen Romance’ is an exhibition investigating this interrelationship. At every point, the malleability of digital culture has been indulged. Where audiences stand is at the conflation of the material and immaterial. An experience with the exhibition is a ricocheting into multidimensional space. You rupture from your body, but are still marred by its physicality.

It never rains in Nicholas Shearer’s vision. The sky is magnificent forever. It fades from day to night and back again but is always calm, open and predictable. This is Play time: 64:02:18, a montage of stock weather images sourced from an Android smartphone weather app. The artist applies movement to the images transitioning them to construct a progression of time. The time is slow, but faster than nature.

With Play time: 64:02:18, Shearer aestheticises delight and pleasure. Transcendental imagery is constructed to mimic a naturally occurring event that is, in the everyday, an aesthetically rare experience. The artist further builds a sense of wonder by employing a soundtrack that is a slowed down version of the one you would hear while playing Final Fantasy IX (a game in which the artist has a play time of 64 hours, 2 minutes and 18 seconds). The subtle and slow moving sounds and images work to construct awe. Meditate on the wonder-­inducing mood and time passes.

Digital culture delivers access to engagements beyond physical worlds. This is the imagined elsewhere. It annihilates place: the place of the transmission, the place of representation and the space in-­between. Boundaries are blurred in the imagined elsewhere, and your embodiment is negotiated through them.

Tippi Hedren is waiting for you to act. She sits daydreaming, anticipating action. But from whom? From the screen? From the narrative? From you?

Erin O’Sullivan’s The Wild Wild Wait places Tippi Hedren as the protagonist of a montage of images. But she has no agency, nobody here does. The shots that play are recognisable and drenched in the iconic moments of film genre. But in this video, the artist does not present a narrative;; she is waiting for the fandom to do that.

Through The Wild Wild Wait O’Sullivan is unpacking the processes and concerns of fandom. This video is at one point homage to genre but also a call to critique it. Do you recognise yourself in these images? Find the hidden subtext and push its boundaries so the image can be corrected, because this work doesn’t exist without you.

Brandon Rahme is also focused on the malleability of the imagined elsewhere. However, while O’Sullivan is exposing absences in pre-­existing worlds, Rahme’s domain is directly concerned with the sites that foreground our release into it.

There is no dock in Thoughts on the Screen (an ode to Tumblr), and space is never static.

Rahme takes viewers on a journey through his computer-­based operation of the Internet, collaging a series of images that indulge the hyper-­image saturation of navigating the computer screen. In this process, Thoughts on the Screen (an ode to Tumblr) exposes how the proliferation of digital culture has transformed the screen away from navigability and birthed a new visual language. This new visual language is a by-­product of the glitches and failures in the hardware of the screen that occur in the attempt to keep up with the digital image. What this work calls attention to are the new narratives of experience within digital culture and how they have influenced new ways of seeing.

Screens are objects, they are the monitors that we communicate within, and that connects us to digital culture. Functions are performed, but our emotional and spiritual connections to them are merged in the experience of the everyday.

Space can be transcended by digital culture but physicality will always remain. Finn Marchant’s screens are first and foremost objects. The artist layers RGM screens over each other, and plays a throbbing white video from a Raspberry Pi through the screens, which creates a swirl of red, green and blue that shift with the motions of the viewer. In this series, the screen is the material used to create an image that is in dialogue with its own objecthood.

In Marchant’s untitled series, every monitor is individual. With the placement of the RGM screens the artist intervenes into their mechanics to emphasise their possible agency, as well as their objective limits. These screens don’t lead you to an elsewhere, instead they are objects calling attention to their own qualities on a material plane of existence.

Yvette Hamilton exhibits a work that claims to do what all mirrors do, reflect you back at you. When looking at this mirror a series of LED lights glow from behind the surface and radiate a purple circle, which now occupies the space where your face used to be. This circle of light has behavioural qualities, and with them, it seems to be erasing you from the equation.

Echo is a mirror, not a screen;; and it doesn’t much like the way you look. You are a humanoid, you see, and the mirror is just correcting the image.

The recognisable (a mirror, your own face) has been transformed and the spiritual has been imbued. The mirror isolates you in the tight space of its frame and then rejects the way you see. It is an object that has unexpected qualities. Technology has interjected and your engagement has been transformed. With Echo, Hamilton takes what you think you know and suggests otherwise.

In ‘Screen Romance’, the screen is positioned as an allegory for the hybridising effect digital culture has on the navigation of the material and immaterial. Their proliferation through digital culture has prompted a material reorganisation of space untethered to place. Digital culture is washing over you, so what do you choose to hold onto?

-­Luke Letourneau March 2015

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