Jill Orr Antipodean Epic 2016. HD video 16:9, 18mins 53sec, colour, sound. Griffith University Art Collection. Donated by the artist, 2018. Photograph: Christina Simons.
Smoke Screen
Smoke Screen continues themes explored in Duty of Care, a joint exhibition project by Griffith University Art Museum and the Institute of Modern Art, Brisbane.
Curated by our Collection Manager Carrie McCarthy and featuring six works from the Griffith University Art Collection’s Moving Image and Sound Archive, Smoke Screen considers notion of care as a means of coercion and control of women.
List of works: Maree Cunnington Secretions 1997; Penny McDowell and Time Slade Link 1994; Janet Mereweather Tourette’s Tics 1993; Tracey Moffatt Night Cries: A Rural Tragedy 1989; Josephine Starrs and Francesca da Rimini White 1996; and Warwick Thornton Payback 1996.
Image: Maree Cunnington 'Secretions ' 1997. Video, colour, sound, 29min 18sec. Griffith University Art Collection. Purchased 1998. Courtesy of the artist.
Things we have known always
Things we have known always takes inspiration from ISEA2024’s theme Everywhen, the concept that while many western cultures believe time is a constant that travels in a linear progression, Australian Indigenous knowledges describe the before then, then, now and the future then existing in the constant presence of place: The Everywhen.
These works exist at the nexus of art and First Nations’ ways of knowing and highlight the role of storytellers as conduits between past, present and future through their understanding of, and relationship to, place.
Primarily championing the voices of Indigenous Australian women, Things we have always known is curated by our Collection Manager Carrie McCarthy and features groundbreaking works that were at the forefront of using art and technology to reimagine and reclaim cultural legacies, amplify marginalised voices, and foster deep connections with the land and multitude of human experiences that surround us.
List of works: Central Australian Aboriginal Media Association (CAAMA) Dam Special from the series ‘Nganampa Anwernekenhe’ 1991; Peter Kennedy and John Hughes On sacred land 1983-84; Tracey Moffatt Moodeitj Yorgas 1988; and Randall Wood Goori Goori Dreaming 1993.
Image: Tracey Moffatt Moodeitj Yorgas 1988. Film, colour, sound, 22min. Griffith University Art Collection. Purchased with assistance from the Australian Government through the Australia Council, its arts funding and advisory body, 1994. Courtesy the artist and Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, Sydney
IN FOCUS: Transient Gaze
Transient Gaze 1 (2005) and Transient Gaze 2 (2005) by Judith Wright are a close exploration of the everyday, experienced via transportation networks. Utilising the documentary aesthetic of camcorder footage, these videos are a significant departure from the highly theatrical aesthetic that dominates much of Wright’s installation and painting practice. What unites these videos within her practice is the fragmented composition of individual shots that act as a series of cues, referencing what lies outside the frame, leaving the viewer to weave a narrative between fragments.
Looking at these videos almost two decades later there is a sense of timelessness that is indicative of Wright’s practice: a perpetual present that is defined by banal gestures repeated over and over. Despite this, the videos remain linked to the moment of their creation: 2005. The banal and everyday context of transportation networks is imbued with an anxiety that was a characteristic of the early years of the twenty-first century.
Image credit: ‘Judith Wright (2005) Transient Gaze 2 , HD Video, 8: 32mins (video still). Griffith University Art Collection. Donated through the Australian Government's Cultural Gifts Program by the artist, 2017.
Cut: The Body as a collage
15 September – 5 December 2022
Cut: The Body as Collage brings together three very short videos: Linda Dement’s Smile (1996), Mikala Dwyer’s Cut (1994) and Robyn Webster’s “The Comb” Snow White (1996). The videos were included in Artrage, a program of video artworks curated by Kim Machan and presented on television during the Australian Broadcast Corporation’s late-night music video program Rage.
The “cut” as an editing technique in both moving image and collage, draws disparate ideas into dialogue by the simple act of cutting and combining images. The “cut” is employed in each of the videos, as both form and content, to disrupt and agitate concepts of the body as a self-contained entity. The three works in this program speak to a particular moment in the historical trajectory toward a decentered self.
Image credit: ‘The Comb - Snow White from Art Rage: artworks for television’ 1996. Video, 1:40 mins, colour, sound, Griffith University Art Collection. Purchased 1999
VNS MATRIX:
'Beg and Gen in the Bonding Booth'
10 June – 15 September 2022
Please be advised that the following content includes themes that may be confronting for some viewers.
VNS Matrix is an artist collective that worked intensively in the 1990s. The four members, Virginia Barratt, Francesca da Rimini, Julianne Pierce and Josephine Starrs produced media heavy projects that combined feminist theory with emerging technologies.
An initial interest in the way women participated in electronic media through pornography led to the development of their project, The Cyberfeminism Manifesto in the early 1990s. The project combined feminist theory, media art and online networking, making it a mode of practice that was linked to a specific moment in the development of the internet. This led to the design of the video game ALL NEW GEN that offered an aggressively dominant female sexuality in contrast to the submissive roles reserved for women in popular technological culture.
Beg and Gen in the Bonding Booth (1993) was part of the larger installation/video game ALL NEW GEN which debuted at the Experimental Art Foundation Gallery in Adelaide in 1993. Beg and Gen in the Bonding Booth portrays a sexual encounter between two women. The camera passes over the two bodies in extreme close-up, as the voiceover embellishes the intimate scenes with the fictional narrative of ALL NEW GEN. The video simultaneously replicates and critiques porn aesthetics, redirecting them toward a lesbian future.
Image credit: VNS Matrix Beg and Gen in the Bonding Booth 1993. Video, 5mins, colour, sound. Griffith University Art Collection. Purchased 2000
STAGING SITES:
Tracey Moffatt & Jill Orr
25 March – 9 June 2022
Staging Sites features work by two iconic Australian artists: Tracey Moffatt and Jill Orr. Moffatt’s Night Cries: A Rural Tragedy (1998) and Orr’s Antipodean Epic (2016) are video art works that employ a theatrical aesthetic to depict sites of trauma within the rural Australian landscape. Both works present a colour-drenched rural Australian landscape, and carefully arranged mise-en-scéne. Their intense visual cues, in combination with an absence of dialogue, set the scene for characters that are at once part of the landscape and removed. The Australian rural landscape is presented as a site of trauma caused by colonial destruction of culture and environment, from Indigenous and non-Indigenous perspectives.
Image credit: Jill Orr Antipodean Epic 2016. HD video 16:9, 18mins 53sec, colour, sound. Griffith University Art Collection. Donated by the artist, 2018. Photograph: Christina Simons.
SCREEN AS ARCHITECTURE
2 December 2021 – 12 February 2022
Screen as Architecture is a selection of videos that engage with the Moving Image Archive portal as both context and subject. Each video draws a parallel between architecture and screens to articulate unique ways in which screen technologies are used to define and control space. As screens become increasingly integrated into architecture, from signage in public spaces, to a movie viewed on a tablet in the home, this curatorial project looks back at the ways in which Australian artists have conceived of this relationship. Screen as Architecture includes works by Brook Andrew (Damage 1998), Lisa Andrew and Lauren Berkowitz (Sight-Seeing Tours 1993), Denis Beaubois (In the Event of Amnesia 1997), Kelly Hussey-Smith (Caged 2010), and Peter Alwast (Relics 2007).
Denis Beaubois’ In the Event of Amnesia (1997), and Lisa Andrew and Lauren Berkowitz’s Sight-Seeing Tours (1993), act as documents of two different ways in which screen technologies are integrated into public space as a method of control. For Beaubois considers this relationship via the one-way gaze of surveillance, while Andrew and Berkowitz this is found in the ubiquitous use of advertising. Brook Andrew’s Damage (1998) presents the urban landscape as a mesh of signs, symbols and contemporary codes that act together to disorient the viewer. Urban signage is an analogue precursor to the use of screens in contemporary urban landscape. Kelly Hussey-Smith’s work, Caged (2010), shifts the focus from humans to animals. The video draws a parallel between glass viewing windows that are common within contemporary zoos and contemporary screen culture, to question the relationship between the natural and constructed. Peter Alwast’s Relics (2007) creates a parallel between the digital environments of animation and the synthetic natural environment, via the collection of different objects within the umbrella of a geodesic dome. Each video in the Screen as Architecture program takes a different perspective on the way in which screen technology and architecture combine to create our environment and define our actions.
Image credit: Brook Andrew Damage from ‘Art Rage’ 1998. Video, 1min 23sec, colour, sound. Griffith University Art Collection. Purchased 1999.