|
| We
are Electric Various artists Arts Victoria Offices 27 January - 13 March 1998 Melbourne |
||
 Elke Varga, Drift,
cardboard, |
Arts Victoria,
symbol of Melbourne's arts establishment, has recently
initiated a practice of inviting emerging artists to
exhibit in the foyer and lightwells of their fifth floor
offices under the title Discrete Projects. A group
associated with 1st Floor artist-run space in Fitzroy
make up We Are Electric, the second of two
exhibitions curated by David Rosetzky which present
collaborations between artists and writers. Transforming
the office space into an '(installation) laboratory', the
seven contributors share a commitment to optimistically
experimenting with ways of making, showing and
communicating 'the future'; that continuously receding
horizon. As the title of the show suggests, unlike the
craze for millenary apocalypse in much visual culture,
the approach might be described as one of organised
innocence. In the foyer, Elke Varga's Magnifying Glass 1,2,3 consists of three vertical perspex strips of digital colour photocopier 'noise'. Electric blue appropriately dominates the grainy brilliance, the result of light experiments with lenses on copying machines. D.J. Huppatz's adjoining vinyl lettering describes the slow explosion of light that is a star. Like all the text in this show, it pervade the object without necessarily endowing it with form or content. In Andrew McQualter's Random Number Generator, angled pale green contact transforms painted black wooden blocks into four large digits, recalling early LED (light-emitting diode) calculators from the 1970s before LCD (liquid crystal display) took over. Balanced precariously on the floor, these variable numbers rehearse the tension between the nightmare and dream of History, evoking an ineffable nostalgia for (or faith in) a future that might have been. In Mira Gojak's nature-culture hybrid Range, a silver wave-like landscape appears in unpicked green astroturf, the inorganic magically imitating the light sensitivity of the organic. And on the wall above, there is an elusive lyric from the musical group Stereolab: Like electronic stars that have been planted . . . they have taken root and spread out. Still in the foyer, James Lynch and Sean Meilak give us Escalator Remix: a video loop showing two young men engaged in the children's game of walking the wrong way up and down escalators. One sports a blue backpack and chain smokes, the other has his hands deep in pockets, and both wear calculated poses of expressionless boredom. They are charmingly nerdy. Captured by the gaze of the video camera, shoppers come and go, with varying degrees of attention and self-consciousness. One woman is tricked into entering the wrong way, before being jolted into realisation. All the while the escalators function as paradoxical emblems of movement and menacing immobility, intensifying the relentless flow of consumer desire and embodied social routine. Lara Travis's accompanying text captures the ambience of the Melbourne Central shopping mall. Panoramically establishing the identity of the place in three minutes of pop-experiential consumer time, she employs a David Bowie song for a soundtrack and the reflection "as I wonder, what are we shopping for today?". This interior narrative contrasts nicely with the video's placeless and impersonal quality, whose cyclical 'escalator time' constructs an endless now of external flows; an exercise machine of habit. In a space entirely surrounded by glassed offices‹with their drooping desk flowers‹Gojak and McQualter have created an artificial forest. Gojak's Beam consists of fake black fur wrapped in leopard-like stripes around nine astroturf-covered beams, which lean tree-like in a spiral against a wall. These are complemented by McQualter's low-lying wooden butterfly wings, with their silver, fluoro-yellow and green swirls. And he has written the Italian and German words for 'butterfly', 'farfalla' and 'schmellerling', on the nearby walls. In another lightwell, Huppatz's words flow around Varga's Drift, which features a series of small red cardboard islands, with corresponding blue outlines on the floor marking a displacement from an earlier location. Huppatz's poetic text eschews an explanation or exercise in the conferral of value, humming instead with 'traces of cosmic harmony'. Order out of chaos. In a final lightwell, Meilak's Trolleys consists of two shopping carts in a romantic (rollerskater-like?) dalliance on a shiny black floor. An advertisement for salmon fillet portions on one of the trolleys explains that "It's so easy to fall in love". Invited to collectively recharge ourselves, We are Electric celebrates a retro-future where conductors explore their potential to become transformers. Daniel Palmer © The artists and |
|
 (left) Andrew McQualter, |
||
 Sean Meilak & James Lynch, |
||
