MAAP presents Louise Bennett and Erika Scott in the 2017 KOSMA International Exhibition, Media Nostalgia: Time Reflection
Still from ‘The Sun From Your Past’ 2017 by Louise Bennett
The exhibition is organised by The Korean Society of Media & Arts and will be shown at the Asia Culture Plaza Outdoor Media Wall (Media Façade), Gwangju, Korea, opening 2nd November and screening until the 5th November 2017. The Asia Culture Plaza Outdoor Media Wall commands an area measuring 75 metres in length and 16 metres high. The program will tour to Malaysia where it will be displayed in December 2017 in another monumental LED screen built into the Manara TM Building, Kuala Lumper.
Still from ‘Hive Mind’ 2017 by Erika Scott
Curator Kim Machan has selected two artists proposing their art works in a format that will closely consider the context of the video wall programming in both locations. Machan says ‘My aim is to treat the thirty-minute time allocation as a conceptual whole rather than a series of short films. Erika Scott’s work Hive Mind 2017 repeatedly alternates with Louise Bennett’s work The Sun from Your Past, 2017 in a thirty-minute screen intervention that challenges the programming format, the materiality of the screen, and artistic experience of the video wall. I see it as a site specific installation rather than a screening venue. Bennett and Scott approach video and the moving image in very sculptural ways which was a compelling reason to include them in this project. While these works are separate and dramatically different in the visual language they use, they combine to activate the architectural space that the screen inhabits. The works occupy two extreme positions – the banal and sublime.’
Still from ‘The Sun From Your Past’ 2017 by Louise Bennett
Bennett’s work ‘The Sun from Your Past’ 2017 repeatedly alternates with Erika Scott’s work ‘Hive Mind’ 2017 in a thirty-minute screen intervention that challenges the programming format, the materiality of the screen, and artistic experience of the video wall.
Hive Mind, 2017 by Erika Scott is edited from VHS home recordings made between 2000-2002 that capture advertising clips broadcast on Australian television. The brand names have been avoided in the editing process leaving a bizarre collection of generic advertising styles that bluntly contrast with today’s digital consumer aesthetics. The public LED billboards that comfortably accommodate the most up to date special effects and entertainment spectacle will instead lapse into a suburban aesthetic dating back seventeen years. Scott flattens the screen space by denying the illusion of depth through the editing pace and the particular quality achieved by the low-resolution recording that in turn unifies all of the edited advertisement fragments. The products and visions are banal; their value lost after the specific short broadcast campaign. Erika Scott’s work fractures time and our expectations by juxtaposing the vernacular television aesthetics that existed seventeen years ago with the most contemporary 21st century environment and technology.
Still from ‘Hive Mind’ 2017 by Erika Scott
The Sun from Your Past, 2017 by Louise Bennett uses footage she has filmed with a hand-held camera recording the sun in the sky. The orientation is ambiguous though the cloud formations, perhaps upside down, suggest this has been filmed from within an aeroplane in privileged proximity above the clouds and closer to the sun. The sun is filmed with tentative movements that imply the person behind the camera is in a process of thinking and experimenting with the view, zooming in to fill the screen with white light, pulling back to locate the sun framed by clouds. The camera struggles with the huge ball of light, recording the flare created by pointing the lens directly toward the sun while blue sky and white clouds define the ‘white hole’ from time to time. The artist will ‘put the sun back into the sky’ at night by emitting its image on the building’s screen. The image of the sun embedded into the building at night is a conceptual approach that transforms the screen into a sculptural object rather than a narrative platform. Through the title, Bennett reminds us that this is the sun you know from your past, the one and only sublime light.
Still from ‘The Sun From Your Past’ 2017 by Louise Bennett
Where: Asia Culture Plaza Outdoor Media Wall (Media Façade), Gwangju, Korea
When: 2 November to 5 November 2017
Artists: Louise Bennett The Sun from Your Past, 2017, colour, no sound, 5 min
Erika Scott Hive Mind, 2017, colour, no sound, 5 min
Curator: Kim Machan
About Erika Scott
Erika Scott works in a variety of media often repurposing discarded household objects and furniture along with hobby materials and popular culture debris. Her visual language is built through inventive and unexpected reassembled materials. Scott was a founding director of the Artist Run Initiative ‘Accidentally Annie St Space’ and more recently runs projects on a rooftop (The Soylent Spot) in Red Hill, Brisbane. Scott has exhibited in the emerging category of the 2016 Redlands Konica Minolta Art Prize in Sydney, The Royal Queensland Show’s Pisciculture competition and at the Pestorius Sweeney House in 2017 in Brisbane.
About Louise Bennett
Louise Bennett’s art practice triggers experiences of shared intimacy by offering ‘wakeful breaks’ to pose questions about how our concepts of and engagements with nature and each other are shifting in contemporary contexts dominated by screen-based technology. Bennett explores this through spatial video works, synesthesia sound to drawing processes and site-specific installations in both public spaces and art gallery museum contexts. Recently she exhibited in the Watou Kunstenfestival in Belgium, and the historic site of Barranco’s Funicular in Peru. She has exhibited in solo exhibitions with MAAP-Media Art Asia Pacific, Pestorius Sweeney House, Boxcopy, and the Ionion Centre for Culture & Art in Greece. Bennett is also a co-director of the Brisbane artist run initiative Accidentally Annie Street Space.
About Kim Machan
Kim Machan is an independent curator and founding director of MAAP-Media Art Asia Pacific and has developed curatorial projects in Australia and the Asia regions since 1998. Machan has pioneered collaborative cultural partnerships with arts organizations and governments throughout the Asia regions to produce and curate major exhibitions, festivals, public art programs and innovative art projects. She has collaborated and curated projects with OCAT Shanghai, China Millennium Monument Art Museum, National Art Museum of China, National Library of China, and China Academy of Fine Arts (Beijing), the China Academy of Art (Hangzhou), Hangzhou Public Library, Shanghai Library, Guangdong Museum of Art, Guangzhou, ArtSonje Seoul, Singapore Art Museum, and others. Machan is currently based in Shanghai and is participating in a curatorial residency with OCAT Shanghai, with the support of Asialink.
Still from ‘Hive Mind’, 2017 by Erika Scott