NOW 7 Years Later
Freemantle Arts Center Western Australia
Ocotober
2008
Now 7 Years
later 2008 digital video 10.00 minutes The End 2008
digital video 8.00 minutes
soundtrack: Frédéric Chopin, Piano Sonata No. 2 in
B-flat minor, Op. 35 (“Funeral March”) played by
various performers [source: YouTube] Recover 2008 plywood table legs
trophy bases pin striped woolen suit fabric 240x90x80cm
Framed photographs
on wall by Chirstine Gosfield Defining Home
The End 2008
digital video 8.00 minutes soundtrack: Frédéric
Chopin, Piano Sonata No. 2 in
B-flat minor, Op. 35 (“Funeral March”) played by various
performers [source: YouTube]
(first draft)
From the Press Release
NOW7 YEARS LATER 9/11 attacks remembered seven years later 11 October – 23 November 2008
The enduring personal horror of the 9/11 terrorist attacks is the
subject of a new work created for the exhibition Fertile
Soil: 50 years of the City of Fremantle Art Collection.
The Collection’s
50th anniversary exhibition celebrates the unique and diverse history
of Fremantle with the work of 50 artists who have called the port
city home.
Melbourne-based artist Elvis Richardson’s
new work, NOW7 YEARS LATER,comprising two videos
and one sculptural installation, has been made in response to Christine
Gosfield’s 9/11…..defining home,
which is part of Fertile Soil.
Gosfield expressed her horror and personal bewilderment at 9/11 when
in the days immediately after the terrorist attacks she made the work
by photographing 360 Fremantle people.
Inspired by
Michael Apted’s Seven Up series, Richardson
has tracked down many of those people, including ex-WA Premier Dr Carmen
Lawrence, to talk and reflect on 9/11, seven years later.
Richardson
herself was in New York when the attacks took place. Her direct experience
of 9/11 lay in contrast to those she interviewed, who watched the
events unfold on television. “I was struck by
how people’s collective emotions were mediated by technology,” Richardson
says. “By speaking to people who watched 9/11 from afar with
distance and objectiveness, it made me rethink my own memory of the
events.”
Similar to Gosfield, Richardson has created NOW7 YEARS LATER in
order to seek out questions, rather than find answers.
9/11…..defining
home and NOW7 YEARS LATER will
be viewed in parallel as part of Fertile Soil.
Richardson’s work is part of Fremantle Arts Centre’s commitment
to commissioning new Australian work. Jim Cathcart, Director of Fremantle
Arts Centre says, “Fremantle Arts Centre is dedicated to supporting
cutting-edge contemporary works and we are pleased to have Elvis onboard
as part of this momentous exhibition.”
Fertile Soil: 50 Years of the City of Fremantle Art Collection NOW7 YEARS LATER 11 October – 23 November 2008
(installation
view) Now
7 Years Later 2008 digital video 10.00 minutes The End 2008 digital video 8.00 minutes soundtrack: Frédéric
Chopin, Piano Sonata No. 2 in
B-flat minor, Op. 35 (“Funeral March”) played by various performers
[source: YouTube] Recover 2008 plywood table legs trophy bases pin striped woolen suit
fabric 240x90x80cm
Framed
photographs on wall by Chirstine Gosfield Defining Home
Now 7 Years
Later 2008 digital video 10.00 minutes
Now 7 Years
Later 2008
digital video 10.00 minutes
Field
Credits
Impossibility of losing in the mind of someone winning
at the Ian Potter
Museum, Sellers Art Prize 2008
Field + Impossiblity of losing in the mind of someone
winning polystyrene,
cold covered plastic figurines from found trophies, metal stand, house
paint 2m x 2m x 2m+ wood and glass cabinet, found and burnt silver trophies
re-silver plated 170 x 95 x 95cm
2008
Elvis Richardson: at the top of her field
Elvis Richardson
collects the totems of disused triumph. Trawling through junkshops
for abandoned sports trophies, Richardson poetically questions how
the meanings of objects invested with victory are altered when severed
from their original source. Left to collect dust on history’s
scrap heap these trophies are bittersweet reminders that we spend much
of our lives aspiring for success, muscling out competition where necessary,
and rationalising setbacks to our lifelong trajectory of accomplishment.
However long our lives might be, they are marked by a finish-line of
death, beyond which the collected markers of our successes can and
often do go astray. Richardson is a collector who rescues objects from
the temporary death of the second-hand marketplace by indexing the
amplified grandeur of these personalised moments and the shared cultural
and social memories underscoring them.
Field
[detail] polystyrene,
cold covered plastic figurines from found trophies, metal stand, house
paint
2m x 2m x 2m
2008
Mount Everest
is inverted in Richardson’s Field (2008) revealing it to be
flat on the bottom: sliced clean off the earth and flipped upside
down to hover in weightless suspension like a lost meteoroid. This
flat surface is used as a ‘level playing field’ for Richardson’s
cornucopia of found sporting trophies. The hierarchies prescribing
the importance of some objects over others in the realm of museum
vitrine display – as evident in Richardson’s The impossibility
of winning in the mind of someone losing (2007) – is dismantled
for the communal camaraderie of team spirit. The line-up of winners
assembled for Field gleam with mute pride, shared success – they
have scaled the mountain, played the field, revelled in their shared
victories.
Impossiblity
of losing in the mind of someone winning
wood and glass cabinet, found and burnt silver trophies re-silver plated
170 x 95 x 95cm
2008
As much as
she reclaims these trophies from the inertia of being unwanted, Richardson
shows how identity is never really ‘levelled out’ entirely,
no matter what the ideologies of team spirit or sportsmanship dictate.
Because it is in triumph where a player is singled out for reward,
in defeat where she or he feels the sting of shame or imagined ridicule.
Unlike the anonymous mass of players comprising a sports team, indeed,
like those frozen for eternity atop the bottom of Everest in Field,
players rise to the top (as much as they can sink to the bottom). Whatever
the case may be, they are named and identified – detached from
the faceless team, however momentarily. The tensions animating the
precarious tightrope between being identified or faceless, extraordinary
or ordinary, a winner or loser, are evoked in Richardson’s video
Credits (2008). Referencing a film’s scrolling credits that rarely
command attention (a cue to leave the cinema or to stop and eject the
DVD), Richardson’s Credits depicts the engraved name plaques
on forgotten op-shop trophies as a literal honour roll or roll call.
Eerily, the engraved plaques call to mind bronze grave markers, which
resonate with the imperatives of death attached to relics of the past
or disused items collected from the trash. The names scroll on an endless
loop, attributing credit to those who triumphed for their team. But
anonymity prevails because reading a name and their conquest tells
you nothing much about the person, once at the top of their field.
These works, which comprise Richardson’s installation for the
inaugural Basil Sellers Art Prize 2008, are a conceptual hagiography
for the faceless heroes whose triumphs are a legacy now lost. Dr Daniel Mudie Cunningham
Curator / Exhibition Coordinator Hazelhurst Regional Gallery & Arts
CentreCunningham
is author of ‘eBay & the Traveling Museum: Elvis
Richardson’s Slide Show Land’ in K. Hillis, M. Petit and
N. Epley (eds), Everyday eBay: culture, collecting, and desire. Routledge,
New York & London, 2006.Cunningham has included Elvis Richardson
in the following curated exhibitions: Reality Check (Hazelhurst Regional
Gallery, forthcoming 2009), Clip Art (Firstdraft Gallery 2007) Shelf
Life (MOP 2006), First Degree (Chrissie Cotter Gallery 2005).
Televisuals : Salute Elvis Installation view Utopian Slumps 2008
The Televisuals water colour pencil drawings apply the hand drawn to the machine produced aesthetic of test patterns designed to convey the authority of technological data, while they were also personalized and identified with each network television station. The TV test pattern is an obsolete devise once used to calibrate colours and reception between monitors and were often used to announce an unintentional or programmed break in network television broadcast. The hard edged abstraction of the test patterns uses a specific and limited range of colours and lines in a variety of ways to test the visual perfection of a projection or monitor.
Televisuals : Salute Elvis Watercolour Drawing 42cm x 30cm 2008
Each drawing and animation segment contains an anagram of the word ‘televisuals’. Televisuals is found to have the broad definition of ‘being suitable for televsion’, which leaves the field wide open for a medium used to great effect by governments to direct marketers. The eleven rearranged self referential letters of ‘televisuals’ ask cryptic questions and make statements. But to whom? They also operate as episodes or chapter headings suggestive of generic sub-plots.
Televisuals : Salute Elvis Watercolour Drawing each 42cm x 30cm 2008
Bastard Love Child Collected VHS cassettes 3m x 40cm x 40cm 2008
BASTARD LOVE CHILD
When showing Televisuals at Utopian Slumps I included the sculpture Bastard Love Child a three-meter high stack of VHS cassettes twisted from floor to ceiling like a DNA helix.
Collecting is a primary method in my art practice used to investigate ideas of individual and shared memories through the material evidence of found objects. Collecting the VHS tapes for Bastard Love Child I was thinking about individual identities becoming collective through televisual memories. Like many of the items I collect the VHS cassette has arrived at its own death dictated by technology, mass production and consumerism. By making it a collectors item and putting it to symbolic and decorative use I hope to comment on its own demise as connected to evolution itself with the structural reference to DNA.
The twisting structure affords the viewer to circumnavigate its form to read the poem of associations and historical documents on each individual spine where the content is recorded. In future exhibitions of Bastard Love Child I would like to create additional stacks and other structures that allow the viewer to construct forms or view content. I also wish to incorporate the solicitation of the cassettes from the public as part of the piece.
The impossibility
of losing in the mind of someone winning
Field Study
#1
archival pegasus print, 41 x 40 cm framed
2007
The works in THE
IMPOSSIBILITY OF LOSING IN THE MIND OF SOMEONE WINNING are from my
silver trophy collection ranging from premiership cups and 21st mugs
to wedding goblets, making explicit the competitive references of
trophies to all facets of our lives. I have then poetically
transformed these items through a experimental trial by fire resulting
in a variety of shocking but beautifully slumped and shattered outcomes.
These fragments are then re-honoured with silvery preciousness for
public display.
The imposibility of losing in the mind of someone winning 56 pieces found trophy, burnt & re-silver plated 10 x 122 x 60cm 2007
The imposibility of losing in the mind of someone winning S.T.B.C found trophy, burnt & re-silver plated 2007
DVD 5 mins (installation
view First Draft Gallery - Clip Art)
2007
Please Stand By (On A Clear Day)
felt tip pen on arches paper
50 x 35 cm
2007
Please Stand By
is a 5 minuite animated DVD. The work starts as a series of drawings
on paper using coloured pencils, felt tip pens and gouche of TV Test
patterns used by local, national and international television networks.
The TV Test pattern is a pictorial devise used to calibrate screens
and monitors, it is generally generated digitally and utilizes lines,
colours and fields to assist in fine tuning for television reception.
TV test patterns were broadcast by networks when there was no program
being transmitted generally after hours. This is of course a thing
of the past as most if not all television networks broadcast 24 hours
a day seven days a week.
Each drawing is then animated where each component moves, revolves,
flips and fades in and out to the old english folk tune of Greensleeves.
Greensleeves was selected as the soundtrack for the animation for its
references to the joy of the Mr Whippy truck and the promises of a
treat, as well as the familiar on hold music one might encounter when
calling a Bank or government department.
The whole effect this DVD is trying to achieve is one of waiting,
being on hold, in a queue, a visual statement that nothing is going
on. A political interjection is made half way through the video reminding
us of our passive intake of information provided by network tv - the
prevailing mass media.
The conceptual endpoint of this project will be making available each
individual animated drawing for download as a computer screen saver
which will be available on the new Elastic an Online Project that will
be launched in Novermer this year and in the future from my own website.
Stop the Clock
Stop the Clock
vinyl banner
Public artwork for
Domain 2006 a temporary public art exhibition funded by the ACT Government
Community Outreach Program and managed by the ANU School of Art
Stop the Clock combines
the visual icons of a clock face and audio visual controls to playfully
comment on time; how we use it, spend it, remember it, recreate it,
and control it and yet don't seem to have it.
Monday-rich and time-poor
are expresions we are now familiar with to describe common cultural
experiences of having a high disposable income through economic growth
and high employment rates, but having verylittle leisure time as a result.
David Broker (Director
of Canberra Contemporary Artspace)writes in the Domain 2006 catalogue
"...The Alinga Street Post Office, unlike those post offices that
are the historical centre of cities, this central post office blends
into its surroundings modern architecture. Almost invisible, this post
office appears to eschew history and by way of its slab-like clock tower
focuses only on the current time. Elvis Richardson's work occupies the
lower reaches of its clock tower and hangs ironically as a reminder
of how time and times change. Stop the Clock, a banner with the familiar
icons of audio-visual controls, constructs a commentary on time, how
we use it and spend it, remember it, recreate it, control it and perhaps
most importantly - how we no longer have it. Focusing on contemporary
issues of time and in particular how leisure time is but a pipe dream
in affluent societies, Richardson returns the post office to its formerly
central position. Where the post office sometimes represents the extended
span of history her work relocates the building in the central context
of an amusing yet worrying critique of life in the immediate present."
Bastard Love Child
Bastard Love Child
+ Couple
657 individually stacked VHS cassetts 370 x 20 x 20 cm
digital prints 140 x 140 cm each
Bastard Love
Child begins with a collection of hundreds of used VHS tapes mainly
purchased from a tip recycle depot in Canberra, garage sales and charity
shops. The collected VHS tapes are an anonymous document of personally
recorded programs and movies from network TV. The installation of Bastard
Love Child uses the brick like form of the tapes themselves to
build various playful structures such as a DNA helix, a city block and
a reclining figure in the gallery space.
Bastard Love Child uses these VHS tapes as the medium of the
work to make explicit our attempt to control and experience history
and present through the activity of watching TV. The title of the work
comments on the inferior reputation TV watching has in our culture where
it is held responsible for everything from low literacy rates and obesity
to more imperceptible mindless vegetative states and general dumbed
down low culture.
Since the 1950’s TV has supplied the most dominant source of entertainment
and information through its programming and commercials and constructs
a distinctive sign of local and national identity and the images of
our collective memory.
Unlike public radio
whose announcers regularly declare it, broadcast TV rarely states the
date or time. Whether it’s the news, advertising or promotions
TV is a self referential medium of the present, it is continually and
rapidly dated by the cultural conventions of the pasts’ present.
At the end of the day the era of VHS lasted 20 years, but our screen
watching activities continue and multiply.
Tomorrows Another
Day curated by Scott Donovan at Artspace
Sydney, Nov 2006.
Cold Case Canberra
Cold Case Canberra
Rope sculpture and platform 2006
In 1986 while driving
along the coast from Melbourne to Sydney with my boyfriend we took the
wrong turn and ended up driving over Mount Kosiosko in an old Rover
2000 that almost never made it.
Early the next morning
we arrived in Canberra where we decided to sleep for a while in the
car. We parked in a suburban street, just off Northbourne Avenue before
it turns into the Federal Highway, reclined our seats and tried to get
some shut eye.
We couldn’t
sleep. It was too strange and quiet. It was like we were surrounded
by evidence of people, but it was completely empty of people. No lights,
no cars, no activity. We drove to a 24 hour service station and slept
there.
Later that year
in my interview to go to art school I said I would like to make a horror
film set in Canberra thinking about my recent sleepless night and its
enchewing fantasies. Twenty years pass and it is 2006 and I have been
living in Canberra now for eighteen months, in Downer, the very same
suburb just off Northbourne Avenue before you enter the Federal HIghway.
I made this work
when I also discovered that I lived only blocks from Keren Rowland (also
a resident of Downer) and the victim of a 1971 unsolved murder who was
the subject of a work I had made in 1999 titled "I
am missing".
Cold Case Canberra
Glass Slides 2006
Slide Show Land 'Dorothy'
Mixed Media Installation
Dimensions Variable
2006
(Exhibited at the Australian
Center for Photography in the exhibition 'If you leave me can I
come too?' curated by Bec Dean)
This most recent
episode of my ongoing project Slide Show
Land was compiled from an extensive collection of 35mm slides purchased
on e-bay of a photographer named Dorothy E. Elsberry dating from 1952-1976.
Dorothy was fond
of photographing particular subjects such as her husband Jack, still
lives, food she cooked, the dinner table, and her horses and farm.
I filled two carousels
of slides, one with Jack and the other with her dinner table arrangements,
that were projected side by side on an automatic timer. Nearby a durotran
of a self portrait by Dorothy with the inscription on the mount 'self
portrait for Jack'.
Collection of current
local and national contemporary art publications - colour coded by various
criteria, consatina magazine rack, stools, highlighter pens
2005
After reading countless reviews about the Venice Bienalle in the most
recent contemporary art publications I was pretty amazed to find hardly
a word of praise for the first female curators that Venice has ever
hosted; Maria de Corral and Rosa Martinez. A key work on entering the
curated Arsenale were described as giant printed posters by the annonymous
New York activist group the Geurrilla Girls. Listing numerous statistics
and exposing a distinct gender pulse of artworld respresentations the
GG have writ large these biases in direct relation ot the city of Venice's
galleries and museums, and the Biennale itself.
No one could argue the success
of GG strategies when in 1985 they used humour and media savvy to expose
a new kind of truth in advertising, yet 20 years later with little change
in the actual statistics they critiqued, most reviewers resented and
openly detested that the GG haven't moved on themselves, as if point
made, case closed.
So I have decided to do a little research of my own and have managed
to print and purchase as many current local, national and international
art magazines and online journals during the month of thier exhibition
at Cross Art Projects as part of Elastic:An Archive Project, and go
through each magazine highlighting in various colours the gender representation.
Well no surprises the statistics for Broadsheet prove to be fairly average
results of my survey. One interesting extra to note is how often when
writing by or about the work of men Wharhol, Beuys & Duchamp are
sure to be mentioned.
BROADSHEET
Volume 34 No 3
COVER : Male
Advertisements : 60 women, 63 men
Articles by : 12 women, 32 men
Illustrations to articles : 11 women, 29 men
About singular artists : 2 women, 9 men
Mention in article : 186 women, 605 men
HODDLE
STREET MASSACRE DVD with surround sound 35mins 2005
When I visited Melbourne in 1998 one of the places I was compelled
to go to was the site of the Hoddle Street Massacre. I saw the event
while watching TV, when regular programming was interrupted by live
footage of darkened streets lit by helicopters sweeping lights, with
a soundtrack of gunfire and cuts to a news reporter’s anxious
excitement as they struggle to describe the scene.The Hoddle Street
Massacre is the name given to a tragedy that occurred on the evening
of August 9, 1987, that resulted in the deaths of seven people and
serious injury to nineteen more, when nineteen year old Julian Knight
opened fire with a semi-automatic rifle in Hoddle Street, Melbourne.
Violent events
of this kind, where the indiscriminate and cruel slaughter of people
takes place, the site itself takes on new meanings. Enlarged through
media repetition the event adds new connotations to an otherwise un-extraordinary
place. Although the details of how many people died that night or
who the killer was faded in my memory, the name and imagined space
of Hoddle Street stayed with me. Unfamiliar with Melbourne, I left
my friends house with a recording walk-a-man and a plan to ask people
on the street their memories of the massacre, what they were doing
when they heard about it, and if they could direct me to the site
where it occurred. The result was a remapping of memory and place
informed by my respondents recall of the event and their description
of my spatial relationship to the site. The recording creates a networked
text of signifiers through which we gain access to the event via several
entrances.
As a method I was
interested to recreate the work seven years later (2005) to plot how
these memories have changed over time, and to injvestigate the erasure
of the publics memory of the Hoddle Street Massacre from one of a
personal connection to one of a myth.
Before + After
BEFORE
& AFTER DVD
with interactive sound track1 Hour 2004
Before and After
projects a split screen through which video footage recorded from
two angles thread continuously from the beginning of a train journey
to the end forever coming and going.
The visual cross
over of simultaneous camera shots assume positions where the same
thing is never recorded at the same time. A list of songs offer the
viewer the choice of compiling the theme track strongly influenceing
the mood of the compiled video footage. The video pauses when the
song ends and resumes when the viewer chooses another. By completely
submitting to the element of sound to objectify the emotional content,
allows the lyrics to narrate each story, creating a moody cinematic
experience.
Before / forwards
: the approaching landscape evokes the epic journey. The familiar
train ride to my job transversed 3 days a week forms this passing
backdrop of a mundane suburban landscape. Its specificity of location
is sublimated through its movement of persistent forging.
After / backwards
: offers the advantage of hindsight, as well a glimpses of objects
in the foreground before they appear in the first screen. The future
rapidly becomes the past.
SLIDE SHOW LAND
Slide Show Land
is an ongoing archive, started in 2001 of 35mm transparencies purchased
on e-bay. The work catalogues the incredible number of images available
for purchase and staggering evidence of the all-pervasive nature of
image taking during the last century that so many could ahve been
jettisoned and lost.
The personalized family snap-hots draw attention to the photographer
as author and reveal family dynamics and customs. Narratives are created
through reading the images in sequence adn further the viewer into
an investigative process of piecing together a probably fiction or
identity based on a 'true story'.
Individual slides have been selected to form photographic and video
works about the collection. The photographs are printed as cibachromes
to retain thier material authenticity. The selected photogaphs arecomibned
in small groupings to emphasise thier narrative adn portrait qualities.
Slide Show Land is for the nostalgic and lost.
Dedications
DEDICATIONS
13 inked photocopies 13x19inches each 2004
printed by Master Printmaker Lisa Mackie, NY
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Americas’ Sweetheart.
So it being Christmas, a very young accoladed beautiful white girl,
murdered, a rich successful businessman and a former state beauty
queen, who stage mothered her daughter through this same pageant convention
to great success, all add up to spectacle enough. But there was more.
The parents. Their expensive lawyers, and what appeared to be their
elusive but showy behaviour and unco- operativeness with the police
investigation into their daughters murder. A dark cloud of suspicion
hangs over them to this day, in particular JonBenet‘s mother
Patsy. This story has become referred to as the JonBenet Ramsey Case.
The persona of
JonBenet Ramsey’s has always been uncomfortably represented
in popular culture. The combined vilification by the media of her
objective status as a tiny tot beauty queen who met a tragic end,and
devotion to this objectification through its continual repetition
have now established JonBenet with some heavy
duty cultural icon status.
