Night Shift
October 15 - 23 2008
Starkwhite is pleased to present Night
Shift, a programme of video art to be viewed from the street,
from 15 to 23 October, 2008.
Capitalising on Starkwhite's street
front location and the nightlife of K Road (once a notorious sex
strip and now Auckland's art strip) the gallery will present a
programme of video art over 8 nights, running from 7.00pm to
7.00am. The videos will be presented as large-scale projections,
able to be viewed through Starkwhite's plate glass windows, with a
street mounted sound system.
The programme will include works
by:
Stella Brennan (Auckland):
Zen DV (2002) uses the built-in Dust
and Scratches filter from the video editing software Final Cut Pro
and a preprogrammed Record Noise filter from an audio editing
application. The filters are applied to video signal generated by
the software itself - bluescreen and bars and tone - images and
sound that mark an absence waiting for information (bluescreen) or
an equipment test (bars and tone). The filters emulate on digital
video the degraded emulsion of film stock and the hiss and scratch
of old vinyl. Zen DV plays on
the strangeness of simulacral dust and scratches and pays homage to
Nam June Paik's 1965 workZen for
Film. Paik's film plays out in light John Cage's
aleatory means of constructing artworks. Zen for
Film is a clear loop of film with no sound-track.
The array of injuries to the film's surface creates the work.
Zen DV is subject to different kinds of loss than Paik's
slowly degrading loop - image compression, smears and scratches on
the surface of the disc - but unlike the film which is eroded by
each performance, the scratched and dirty image that the digital
video presents will be the same the first and the thousandth time
it is played.
Daniel Crooks (Melbourne): Pan
No.4 (Polar Coordinates), 2007, courtesy of the artist and the
Anna Schwarz Gallery, Melbourne. Using his renowned 'time-slice'
technique, Crooks transforms everyday sights such as trains and
city streets into wide-screen meditations on time and motion. He
computer processes original video footage so that each frame
contains areas from the original shot, but from different moments
in time. The effect is to spatialise time and temporalise space.
Sometimes Crooks so distorts space and abstracts his subjects that
they become unrecognisable; other times the effect is subtle,
suggesting an uncanny bulge in an otherwise familiar
scene.
Terrence Handscomb (Los Angeles):
The Revelation/The Passion According to Andrei (2004).
Handscomb's work examines issues of political torture
and the abuse of political power. It specifically
references the images of torture and abuse by American
military police in Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq.
Now living in California, the New Zealand artist comments:
"these images emphasised the hypocrisy of official
wartime rhetoric coming out of the Whitehouse. The loss of basic
human values could not be concealed." Shot in grainy
black and white, with an operatic soundtrack, The
Revelation/The Passion According to Andrei features a nude
Handscomb in various poses. A recurring theme in the artist's work
is a play between eroticism and something a little more sinister.
The Revelation uses the subtle play of
eroticism and abuse as it attempts to humanise the objects of
political torture by inverting the identity of victor and
the vanquished.
Harald Hund and Paul Horn (Vienna):
Habibi Kebab - From the Life of an Artist (2003).
Habibi Kebab is a makeover of old Turkish movie footage
with new subtitles by the artists that replace a soppy love story
with a provocative and amusing account of the intellectual angst of
the artist trapped within the modern day art establishment. It
looks behind the scenes of the art world, offering an ironic take
on the challenges artists encounter on the road to fame and
success. Generation conflicts, exploitation by gallerists and
misinformation, coupled with artistic self-doubt and eagerness to
succeed, all combine to shape a problematic discourse.
Hye Rim Lee (New York):
Crystal City (2008), a new video in which
TOKI, a highly stylized curvaceous, warrior-cum-vixen who draws
upon the Japanese tradition of Manga, Korean animamix and Western
ideals of sexuality and beauty, acts as a vehicle for fantasy
exploration by dragon YONG. Together they journey
through cities of crystal buildings and towers resembling adult
fantasy/fetish toys that spin and whirl, gradually speeding up and
changing colour. The Korean born artist is interested in art that
expands our understanding of interactivity, digital aesthetics and
the culturally loaded significance of software reflecting the
Animamix cultures of Japan and Korea. Her work challenges the
conventions of the traditionally male-dominated worlds of game
structure and 3D animation, specifically when it comes to
virtualised images of women.
Jae Hoon Lee (Auckland):
Subway (2002) was shot over a two-month
period in a subway system in Seoul, Korea. Using this footage, Lee
has created a virtual Korean subway station, which he projects into
physical space at Starkwhite. Lee leads a nomadic life, collecting
source material for his work on his travels. He traverses cultural
terrains, recording and scanning nature, urban scenes, daily
objects and banal accidents. He looks for random situations,
happenings on the street and natural phenomena to assemble an image
bank of his experiences. Lee uses this material to create a montage
of moving images and patterns on a virtual timeline. By
combining documentary photography and fictional possibilities
offered by new technologies he sets up a compelling interplay of
real and virtual experiences.
Jill Millar (San Francisco): I
am Making Art Too (2003). Miller's witty video
revisits John Baldessari's 1971 video-performance piece I am
Making Art. The younger artist, Miller, brings Baldessari's
tai chi-esque movements into contemporary times by transforming his
original meditative gestures into breakdancing moves. Miller then
inserts herself into the remixed video footage and busts some
postmodern moves around Baldessari. Missy Elliot's Work it
backs up the new Baldessari-Miller collaborative dance. The three
artists (Baldessari, Elliot and Miller) form a new collaboration.
The video approaches a variety of questions relating to women's
roles in history, artistic authorship, younger artists' attempts at
appropriation/homage and the nature of the creative act in video
art. All I am Making Art footage has been used with the
enthusiastic permission of John Baldessari.
Grant Stevens (Los Angeles): In the
Beyond (2007), a new video-text mandala. Stevens is known for
his pithy text-videos exploring vernacular and mass media truisms
and recalling advertising, movie trailers and relaxation videos.
Stevens trades in clichés, platitudes and stock phrases but
points to their richness probing the overlap between mass media
fictions and everyday reality. While some of his works play with
language's slipperiness, others emphasise its hyper-lucidity.
Against the backdrop of modern life's impossibly hyperactive
schedules, his new works go fishing for personal reflection,
self-expression self-help, new age spirituality and other ways to
get a grip.
Located in New Zealand on Auckland's
Karangahape Road, Starkwhite presents a programme of artists'
projects, solo shows, independently curated exhibitions and
occasional forays into new music and other interdisciplinary
practices. Starkwhite also represents artists from New Zealand,
Australia and the Pacific rim.
Please contact the gallery for further
information on the Night Shift programme.
Starkwhite 510
Karangahape Road, Auckland, New Zealand
Tel. +64 9 3070703 & 3070704
Monday to Friday: 11.00am to 6.00pm, Saturday: 11.00am to
5.00pm
starkwhite@starkwhite.co.nz
www.starkwhite.co.nz
