three monitor installation, 20:00 mins, 1981
Roslyn Oxley Gallery Sydney (1981) and “A Different Perspective” Artspace Sydney, (1981)

This three monitor installation was the result of a workshop with Douglas Davis and Jane Bell in Sydney in 1980. Elementary Alphabetical deals with the loss of language in the process of migration. On one monitor a silhouette figure “inside” the screen writes the Greek alphabet in oil and then in pencil on a sheet of paper (which represents the interior surface of the screen). On a second monitor a hand which is exterior to the image of the first screen attempts unsuccessfully to imitate the writing. The central monitor has photographs of the artist’s family played on a videotaped monitor. Onto the screen of this monitor the same set of photographs, out of sequence, is placed randomly, as though in a
game of snap.

Peter Callas