God, how we love airports. We love the impersonal atmosphere, the transient empty spaces, the chilly air conditioning, the smell of stale smoke and the distant tang of air fuel. Sure, we have an irrational fear of being blown up, shot or crashed into a building, but as far as the glossy, smiling face of globalisation goes, airports are a glimpse of the future. If you want to know what the whole world is going to be like in 2500 when everyone speaks English like they are Malaysians from America, where just-brewed coffee is available all the time, go directly to Sydney Airport and taste the world of tomorrow.
Merilyn Fairskye, CDG/#1/1sec, 2005.
Merilyn Fairskye’s new show Stati d’Animo at
Stills Gallery is a visual tribute to the stateless acres of international territory just behind the departure gates of the world’s airports. Drawing on the works of Futurist artist Umberto Boccioni’s and his paintings of train stations, Fairskye has updated the old Fascist’s style using video technology to create a series of ‘videographs’ that recreate moments in time. Fairskye has done this in two ways – either sequencing one frame after another to create dense photo mosaics – or placing 25 frames of images on top of one another. This second process creates solids in the unmoving objects – furniture, architecture – and ghosts where things move – people and moving machines.
Fairskye’s last show at Stills was Connected which consisted of ghost images of people talking on mobile phones in public spaces. Using the same idea of connectivity, Fairskye’s new body of work lacks the immediate theatrical visual impact of Connected but builds up a strange sense of timelessness in her selection of anonymous but familiar airport spaces. Unlike the banality that is often invoked by artists such as Fischel & Weiss in their comedic cataloguing of the world’s tarmacs as seen from the window of passenger planes, Fairskye’s work is altogether odder. The familiarity of the grain and texture of the video image seems commonplace and unremarkable but the richness of the work is hard to deny. Perhaps it is that kind of familiarity that often blinds us to the magic of these international non-spaces and by using video – something nearly everyone with a new mobile phone now has – Fairskye has selected the perfect medium to make this work.
Accompanying the photographs is a three screen video installation called 60 Seconds. We have often found Fairskye’s video works either screened alone or shown in conjunction with gallery exhibitions to be particularly problematic. In the past her videos have tended towards dense collages of loosely themed material that while they make perfect conceptual sense, sit uneasily within cinematic or gallery contexts. Too dense to be successfully taken in while perched on a gallery seat, too minimal for a theatre screening where audiences demand more narrative resolution and detail, Fairskye’s videos have always left us uncomfortable. 60 Seconds , however, is her most minimal gallery video we have seen and as such works brilliantly. The left screen is a loop of a plane being pulled along a tarmac backwards and forwards, the middle screen is some time lapse ghost shots of passing people and the right screen is a calming loop of passing clouds. If there was any sound or music we can’t recall, but it felt silent and endless and although it lasted for just 60 seconds it was pretty much perfect.
