From Stella Rosa McDonald…
In this two-channel video installation, set in the circular and elliptical rooms of Elizabeth Bay House, the works of Gary Carsley, Pia Van Gelder, Tracey Moffatt, Sarah Mosca, Tomislav Nikolic, Giselle Stanbourough and Peter Weibel are passed over by a roving camera and occasionally witnessed by a lone female figure. In line with the notions of Acid and Gothic the visited artists all disrupt standard models: Mosca upsets the latent image’s reliance on the camera, Carsley questions the value of artistic production, Moffatt looks for reason in drug induced dystopias. Acid/Gothic follows a circuitous logic that is both charming and burdensome—in the same way that taking acid might elucidate and forever alter some things or confuse and damage others.
There is a feeling of resistance in the installation—we see the works only when the camera wants us to see them—the sense of things is split, making it difficult to engage with the particularities of mediums, textures, and colours. We see reproductions rather than originals. Looped footage from The Hudsucker Proxy and Jurassic Park appear in the video, in particular scenes that show the invention of the hula-hoop in the former and the ominous disturbance of history and matter in the latter. In Acid/Gothic nothing is solid, instead the installation exists as part of a larger collage. In the issue of Das Superpaper that accompanies the exhibition, texts by Isobel Parker Phillip and Monica Behrens in particular illuminate the subtleties and richness of the Acid/Gothic paradigm in ways that the installation does not.
Until September 14th
Galerie Pompom, Chippendale
Pic credit: Peter Weibel, Vulkanologie der Emotionen, (Vulcanology of Emotions) 1971/1973, 16 monitors, video, 7:20 min. Courtesy of the artist and Galerie Anita Beckers, Frankfurt. Installation view, Elizabeth Bay House, Sydney.
