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Dailies An introduction by Morag Dempsey Addressing the phenomenon of repetitive cyclic viewing, Charles Ninow’s Milk and Honey isolates two specific scenes of a larger narrative to which the viewer is left only to guess the exact identity and location of. They exist as fragments of a greater whole but it is their endless looping repetition that creates a circularity, ensuring their status as autonomous objects or fully formed moments in their own right. This process of magnification ensures that they assume an importance that is seemingly incongruous. Yet it is this feeling that pervades both works which ultimately refers to the greater narrative that informs them, to that which we as viewers are left only to attempt to grasp. The physical dislocation of these individual scenes alludes to the artist’s own migration, as having moved at a young age with his family from South Africa to New Zealand. Arriving in Browns Bay is edited from footage taken at a South African festival in Browns Bay, and while this exterior information illuminates the nature of these works as fragments, it is a knowledge that is in fact subsidiary, neither a prerequisite nor necessary to their comprehension as independent objects. Richard Frater’s In a Nutshell (Metaphysics) deals with the minute, a collection of tiny moments that are slowly carried out directly in front of the camera. Staged in a tightly confined space with a shallow depth of field, it is composed of a series of sequences, in which a walnut is methodically taken apart. This seemingly simple act is transformed by the way in which each detail of these actions is magnified through the direct focus that is maintained upon the overt materiality of its objects. As it cuts from one sequence to the next, it becomes less about the establishment of any particular kind of narrative than about the presentation of monuments to the process itself. In Sean Grattan’s work Song About a Man, a dream-like, almost primordial space is constructed in order to allow an examination to take place of the issues of both individual and collective identity. A retreat from the everyday is signalled by the continual return of the image to the same point of entry, the blank and empty sky that consumes its frame. This doubling of beginning and end serves to ensure the space contained within it as a site that can repeatedly be entered into and reworked, echoing the ever-changing and fluid nature of identity itself. A narrative is hinted at yet it does not lead us from one fixed point to the next; rather time is structured in order to function as a complete representation of a single coherent space. The sense of suspension and timelessness that this creates is extended into the physical space of the viewer, through the presence of the leaves that fill the area alongside it. Encased behind glass, these serve to provide an exterior to the work, through the repetition of the organic elements contained within its diegesis. Taken from archival footage sourced from documentaries on space exploration, Veronica Crockford-Pound’s Bottle Rocket consists of a rocket launch projected onto the surface of a bottle. The pairing together of these seemingly disparate elements highlights the dual and interconnected nature of stasis and motion. Stripped of its status as a functional, everyday item, the surface of the bottle is appropriated as a type of screen. In one sense, this renders it inanimate as an object, transforming it into a mere surface, but it simultaneously retains the power to manipulate and define this projection. Just as the rocket reaches the top of the bottle, the footage is looped so that it returns to the beginning in an endlessly repeating cycle. This ensures that movement is constantly thwarted in the piece, as the rocket remains trapped within the confines of the bottle, and it is a frustration in which the viewer must actively participate. |
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