Six short films commissioned to bring visual artists’ work into cinemas in subversive and playful ways, curated by Mark Williams, Director, CIRCUIT Artists Film and Video Aotearoa New Zealand.
Costume for a Mourner (Sriwhana Spong 2010)
Sriwhana Spong's Costume for a Mourner is an imagined reconstruction of a scene from the performance of Serge Diaghilev’s Les Ballets Russes series, "Le Chant du Rossignol (The Song of the Nightingale)", which premiered in 1920. Spong recreated the striking black-and-white felt costume, originally designed by Henri Matisse, from archival photographs. Combined with Igor Stravinsky’s original musical score, choreography by dancer Benny Ord, Spong expresses her metaphysical concerns through the conflation of material and immaterial art forms. She states, "This piece is very much about distance, translation, archives and the imagined gaps between documents".
2.5 Kilometre Mono Action for a Mirage (Alex Monteith 2011)
Flux, balance, illusion. A Moto-X rider pulls a continuous wheelie over 2.5 kilometres of coast-line north of Muriwai in Aotearoa New Zealand. The wheelie is one of the most delicately balanced longer durations stunts for a MX rider. The action was conceived specifically for the hazy atmospheric conditions of the Aotearoa coast and takes place on the hard sand revealed only at low tide.
Carmen San Diego: Out of Work and On the Run (Sean Grattan 2011)
New Zealand-born, LA-based video artist Sean Grattan's Carmen San Diego: Out Of Work And On The Run subverts filmic conventions and the notion of goal-based behaviour, creating an essentially gestural production that is activated by its imperfection. Questions of success and failure, and of subjectivity and objectivity, lie at the heart of the work, which engages with its viewers' expectations whilst simultaneously resisting them. A philosophical drama in which nothing dramatic takes place – a production that plugs wordy explanations of content into a cinematic form that looks like an action movie but sounds like a lecture. Filmed by Grattan while a student at CalArts in Los Angeles.
Between Worlds (Philip Dadson 2011) A single boat prow navigates through a series of landscapes, charting the interconnectedness of time, people and space – exploring the interstice between worlds, inner and outer, between dimensions tangible and illusory: a world-upside-down view intersecting with reflections on geometry, nature, signs and portents.
The Other Mother (Ronnie van Hout 2011)
“The film features six characters working in Antarctica, all with identical faces and all played by van Hout. Because the alien can morph into any human form it desires, the leading character was desperately trying to identify the monster from within a group of its identical clones, taking samples of blood and poking with a hot wire - something apparently excruciating to the visitor. Personally I think this is the best film van Hout has made so far, far less hammy than say, the drunken chimp vids, with unexpected dramatic tension and more convincing acting and dialogue. There were lots of moving bodies - pogoing, writhing and twitching - accompanied by rapidly distended, bulbously lopsided physiognomies. It’s very entertaining visually as the different van Hout selves (this is one interpretation) convulse energetically, glare murderously at each other, and shrink inside their clothes.” – John Hurrell
Voodoo Dog (Gray Nicol 2011)
“In Voodoo Dog the camera carefully, lovingly roves over the surface of a sculpture of a dog made from discarded machine parts. The camera seems to be telling us that each part holds stories and, consequently, a power” - Mark Amery.
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