By Peter Maddern
Back as a part of SALA are moving image works and back also, at the Artspace, are two of the artists who displayed works there this time last year. At that time we made the following comments (See that review here) about the works displayed:
‘The concept of what works as ‘Moving Image’ artwork is clearly still being refined. Some of the works in the Artspace suffer for repeating sequences within them, leading a viewer to question whether the artist has just got lazy and looks to pad out the head line length through recycling or did they simply just run out of ideas. Others fail through use of third grade cameras and jerky hand held shoots that give the works a point and snap feel; the artists just got lucky with some vision and decided to dress it up and call it art.’
No such reservations can be applied this year to what is a very notable collection. Thom Buchanan has produced a time lapse video of him drawing and painting a crowed streetscape. The development of the image from an almost indistinct male figure in the bottom left of the white canvas to the fully fledged coloured street is appropriately quick but with a similarly nuanced focus on the drawing rather than the frenetic activity conjured by the filming technique. Having the car in the foreground drive off into the night may have rounded this off superbly but here’s to a critic dreaming.
Leith Matson’s After Hours displays three long pans across stills of country, suburban and city scenes (the last being of the King William to Morphett St length of Hindley St) that draw you in not only about the technique involved but the changing light, especially the reds and yellows of the sunset or street lights. The Hindley Street portion is quite captivating, the colours giving it that almost menacing mix of glitz and violence that we know of it, with crowded sidewalks adding to the feel.
Bridgette Minuzzo however takes the prize for the most stunning of the works. Starting with a quaintly framed vision of a sheet blowing as a sail across the top of the Festival Centre, that venue as a theme is then repeated in three extraordinary octagonal kaleidoscopes of images of the Festival Centre, inside and out – images that ease in and thrust out, appear and disappear, rotate and dazzle and then get overwhelmed by a vivid white clouded blue sky, the same used in the first piece of the series. It is her eerie music also that resonates throughout the Artspace when you are there.
As mentioned, not one of last year’s reservations can be repeated here and Minuzzo’s creativity is well worth the visit alone.
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