Scenes from Paramount Mountain

Overview

In celluloid we might have a chance to fight mortality and stay forever young, but who owns the images of ourselves on film and what happens when people start messing with them? Citing Laura Mulvey's essay Visual Narrative and The Pleasure Principle, the Paramount Pictures logo and independently run amusement parks like The Ned Kelly Museum as their starting points, William Mansfield and Eddie Sharp's interactive sculpture and video installation Scenes from Paramount Mountain explores cinema, immortality and the politics of owning and re-appropriating images. Through live feeds, faithful miniature papier-mâché reproductions and lo-fi video effects they have conjured up a haunted theatrical space of open-ended narratives. Opening on Friday night at Serial Space, the exhibition is a sneak peak of the larger theatre-based installation Some Film Museums I Have Known, which is commissioned by ACMI to coincide with the 2010 NEXTWAVE festival in Melbourne.