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2001 – 2003
Collaboration with performer Wendy McPhee
Nightshift is a large scale multiple screen video installation. Six life sized video projections of McPhee’s emotive performances flicker across a grid of veil-like screens installed within the darkness of the gallery. Walking through the installation the viewer is surrounded by these evocative and disturbing images that fracture the space leaping from one screen to another, continually shifting our center of attention around the space.
Borrowing from the urban mythology of subliminal advertising these images are inter-cut with a cascade of words and phrases that flicker in and out of view, riding on the threshold of our perceptions and triggering off rapid stream of conscious and subconscious readings.
Through the central character of the video images, performer Wendy McPhee draws viewers into a series of overlapping meditations on the themes of femme performance, solitude and longing, incorporating an eclectic range of imagery from Karaoke bar pop-music fantasies, to voyeuristic peepshow and surveillance style footage.
Reversed texts confound preconceptions about the correct perspective from which to view the images, encouraging audiences to observe from numerous perspectives: front, behind, sideways, and through different layers of projected imagery.
The accompanying soundtrack creates a trance-like atmosphere blending slowly undulating layers of mechanical clicks and pulses with the sounds of distant bar room ambience and mysteriously indecipherable whispers.
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Photo-documentation by Simon Cuthbert, Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery, Bond Store, 2002.
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Nightshift ‘s latest incarnation has increased the work magnificently in scale, complexity and duration, and is magically immersive in Artspace’s largest gallery. On opening night, guests disappeared into the darkened space for long, satisfying reveries, wandering amidst the large transparent screens, intrigued by the flickering images reminiscent of peep shows, silent movies and film noir, but uniquely something else-a curious meditation on dance movement and sexuality. Images multiply and enlarge across the space with a photographic intensity and viewers become a shadowy part of the picture themselves in this intimate walk-in cinema of desire. The addition of extended movement passages to the original enigmatic glimpses of McPhee and a more audible and developed sound score confirm Nightshift as a major work in new media arts.
Keith Gallasch, RealTime 51
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Credits
Wendy McPhee: Performance and texts
George Khut: Installation concept, sound, videography and editing
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Acknowledgements
Nightshift’s creative development and subsequent exhibition tour was supported by the Australian Government through the Australian Council for the Arts, its arts funding and advisory body. Special thanks to Sarah Miller (PICA), Fiona Winning (Performance Space), Helen Cole (Arnolfini), Nick Tsoutas (Artspace) and Bill Bleathman (TMAG).
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Exhibition Dates
2001: Performance Space (double-projector version), Sydney, New South Wales, Australia, present by Carnivale.
2002: Artspace, Sydney, New South Wales, Australia, curated by Nick Tsoutas.
2002: Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery, Hobart, Tasmania, Australia, curated by Bill Bleathman.
2003: ‘Inbetween Time 2003′ festival of live art and intrigue, curated by Helen Cole, Arnolfini, Bristol, UK.
2003: Perth Institute of Contemporary Art, included in ‘Dancers are Space Eaters’, curated by Sarah Miller, Perth, Western Australia.
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