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| Parable Various artists Stripp Gallery 28 February 1999 Melbourne |
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 Angus Blackburn, |
Large group shows such as Parable,
which brings together the work of nine Melbourne-based
artists, offer an attractive opportunity to compare a
number of different contemporary practises. Phil Edwards
has put together an ambitious mix of works including a
sculpture of his own, paintings by Andrew McCausland and
Nick McGowan, a sound and photography work by Peter
Henderson, a found object installation by Simon Kilvert,
a furniture and photography work by Bill Cobbett, and
video-based work by Angus Blackburn, Laresa Kosloff and
Sue Dodd. Sue Dodd’s Eye Movement Desensitization & Reprocessing (Que sera) borrows its name from EMDR, a clinical therapy developed over the last decade said to help the recovery of trauma and anxiety disorders. Dressed in black, Dodd sits on the floor facing a large monitor, which shows a close-up of her own eyes following the movement of a metronome. Her left hand covers her eyes while she follows the movement of the image with her right index finger. During the two minutes of this performance Dodd sings along to her own recording of Que sera. Tension arises between the two subject positions assumed by Dodd: anxiety in Dodd’s eyes in the video image and the sentiments of the one who sits on the floor. Trauma is also present in Laresa Kosloff’s The Final Shootout, a video loop of the wounding of Ned Kelly, taken from The Story of the Kelly Gang, the popular 1906 Australian film said to be the world's first feature length action film. A slightly slower version of the original, the speed gives this work an arresting, photographic quality. In his clumsy iron armour, the injured bushranger is seen stumbling, firing bullets as the Police gun him down. As the hero falls on the ground the film foregrounds its age, by emphasising the film’s blotches. Kosloff rescues this fortuitous dissolution of both the bushranger and form by repeating it, like the persistent recollection of a traumatic event. And the lack of sound only adds to the work’s sense of mourning where the hopeless egalitarian hero is gunned down as the image dissolves. The theme of dissolving subjectivity may also be detected in Angus Blackburn’s Ramblin’, a video loop of a road scene viewed through a car window. Blackburn depicts a car ride along a coastal road at dusk which is overlayed with an accelerated version of Hank Williams’s Ramblin’ Man. The music is introduced a few seconds into the sequence, at which point the image turns into step motion, lending a painterly quality to the scene. Passing cars become colourful, brisk brushstrokes and tree canopies dissolve into abstraction. The curious layering of arrested motion and accelerated sound offers a chance to venture the limits to normal, conscious perception. The distorted speed invites the subject to occupy an unstable position in which form and sense become slippery. A ghostly figure appears in the background from time to time — presumably Blackburn’s reflected image on the window. More than a figure, what opens up is a tenuous space for the viewer to sense. "Parable" derives from the Greek paraballein, meaning to put alongside, to compare. The thematic continuity that emerges comparing the three video-based works featured in this show is reason enough to welcome Edwards’s curatorial initiative, and his pertinent choice of name. It seems odd that he felt the need to spell out a moral preoccupation. In his liner notes, Edwards concludes, "there is no moral position espoused by any of the work in this exhibition, just the suspicion that those who look at it, as well as those who make it, have one that is invisible, most of the time, as a shadow in a well lit room." Perhaps, but that’s another story. Jorge López © The artists and |
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 Andrew McCausland, untitled,
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 Bill Cobbett, Why are they |
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