Chris Ulbrick
Australia
Slow, spun song

Collaborations in art tend to be short lived with some exceptions. Among those few are two artists from Sweden, Lars Bergstrom born 1962 and Mats Bigert born 1965.

"We met in the Art Academy in Stockholm in 1985 and started out with making performances as well as our individual work. The collaboration kept growing in scale and developed into a full time habit and we realized that brainstorming was more turbulent than twisting a single mind."

Technologies, materials, sounds, pictures, concepts, vibrations are all part of Bigert & Bergstrom's art. Anything can act as a catalyst for a new process - another offshoot from the rhizome. At h, they are presenting two works, Tea Party, a four part video installation and Short Circuit No.5, a large drawing produced by fuse wire.

Bigert & Bergstrom have exhibited widely including Aperto 93 at the Venice Biennale and Pompidou Center in Paris. In 1995 they took up artists residencies at Kunstlerhaus Bethanien in Berlin.

Ulbrick's installation, Slow spun song engages audience space as a plastic and dynamic production through mobilised light and sound. Recorded specifically for this exhibition, a song from Purcell's opera Thy hand Belinda/When I am laid in earth, is slowed and rotated in the exhibition space with the aid of computers. This work explores the impact that "intelligent" machines have with regard to our concepts and measures of space, time and location, and elaborates upon the relationship we have with information technologies, their spectacles and seduction.

Ulbrick's recent exhibitions include Hum Phase in 1997 at Linden Gallery Melbourne, Assay in 1994/5 at the Experimental Art Foundation in Adelaide, Ruins in reverse, a group exhibition at RMIT Gallery in 1996 and Calibration Suite in 1996 at the Art Centre Annexe Studio in Pasadena.

Bigert & Bergstrom, Tea Party, colour video, 1997, (mov file with audio 140k, file requires Quicktime plugin).

Bigert & Bergstrom, Tea Party, colour video, 1997, (mov file with audio 163k, file requires Quicktime plugin).

Bigert & Bergstrom, Tea Party, colour video, 1997, (mov file with audio 185k, file requires Quicktime plugin).

Bigert & Bergstrom, Tea Party, colour video, 1997, (mov file with audio 239k, file requires Quicktime plugin).

Bigert & Bergstrom, Short
circuit no.5, burnt
fuse wire, 1997

Chris Ulbrick, Slow spun
song, sound installation,
1997

Chris Ulbrick, Slow spun
song, sound installation,
1997