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2008 Televisuals / Salute Elvis 2007 The Impossibility of losing in the mind of somone winning | Please Stand By | Stop the Clock 2006 Bastard Love Child | Cold Case Canberra | Slide Show Land 'Dorothy' 2005 24 Men + 6 Women | Hoddle Street Massacre 2004 Before + After | Slide Show Land 10 Collections, Dedications
Televisuals : Salute Elvis
5/25 Easey St Collingwood VIC 3066
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.
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.
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 The twisting structure affords the viewer to circumnavigate its form to read the poem of associations and historical documents on each individual spine where the content is recorded.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
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.
Please Stand By
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
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 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.
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
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".
Slide Show Land 'Dorothy'
Mixed Media Installation 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'. Download Catalogue (1.1MB .pdf)
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