The Sydney Contemporary Video Exhibition

Overview

What is the difference between video art and a short film? Is there one? Sydney Contemporary has teamed up with Sydney Film Festival to put on an epic showcase of video art. In between cinema sittings, you can stop by the Festival Hub at Lower Town Hall for a taste of Heath Franco, Deborah Kelly, Jess MacNeil, Baden Pailthorpe and many more. The show features plenty of home-grown talent and a sprinkling of international artists.

Each artist has a radically different take on visual culture, from conceptual to cinematic. For instance, New York-based artist Josh Azzarella uses seminal moments from pop culture and news media to reconstruct history. And Heath Franco is collaborating with David Capra to produce a new understanding on the Hollywood dream sequence, mashing together Disney’s Dumbo and Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo. Meanwhile, Jess MacNeil’s work is a more metaphysical study on how we move through space and time, and Joan Ross uses animation and collage to critique colonisation in brutal and beautiful ways.