3 Exhibitions at Artspace
Three exhibitions at Artspace are flush with the power of the moving image.
Overview
Neither insurgent nor collaborator, Picasso kept painting in occupied Paris. He wrote Desire Captured by the Tail, a play staged in an apartment and directed by Albert Camus. Damiano Bertoli's Continuous Moment: Anxiety Villa at Artspace draws inspiration from the play, its art splayed across an abstract moment. Thick cross-hatched lines occupy the floor of the piece, a picnic is unwrapped in one corner and a slender dummy stands with a thin mirror for leg. In the background images play untethered from their sound. It feels like a dreamspace from a surreal movie of the sixties; a drawing exercise sprung to life on an infinite plane.
At the other end of the gallery, Justene Williams Hot Air Hillbilly Weekend Workshop features a wall of TVs, looping scenes of a paper-covered yellow-pink creature ambling around a papered room. The creature makes a cacophany of light and colour to go with the dazzle and sound of ethereal tv-glow, which dominates the room. The theme of the work is anti-consumerist, but the work itself grabs your eye with a short Gruen all its own.
Meiro Koizumi's Voice of a dead hero draws on a letter from Toshio Anazawa — a Kamikaze Pilot — to his one-time fiancé Chieko, full of love and regret. From rough focused images of pedestrians, Meiro's Toshio emerges in an out-of-focus world clutching his face, like a soldier slipping out from a fog. His frantic, laboured breathing covers all other sounds on the streets and subways of Tokyo, as he walks to a shrine for the war dead. He calls for Cheiko. Meiro's Theatre Dreams Again of a Beautiful Afternoon features two screens showing either side of the inside of a Tokyo train carriage. A man in a business suit breaks down one one side, a woman watches him from the other. There is only one problem: each side of the train is going in opposite directions.
Still image from Voice of a Dead Hero by Meiro Koizumi.
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