Collaboration with performer Wendy McPhee

Nightshift is a large scale multiple screen video installation. Six life sized video projections of McPhee’s emotive performances flicker across a grid of veil-like screens installed within the darkness of the gallery. Walking through the installation the viewer is surrounded by these evocative and disturbing images that fracture the space leaping from one screen to another, continually shifting our center of attention around the space.

Borrowing from the urban mythology of subliminal advertising these images are inter-cut with a cascade of words and phrases that flicker in and out of view, riding on the threshold of our perceptions and triggering off rapid stream of conscious and subconscious readings.

Through the central character of the video images, performer Wendy McPhee draws viewers into a series of overlapping meditations on the themes of femme performance, solitude and longing, incorporating an eclectic range of imagery from Karaoke bar pop-music fantasies, to voyeuristic peepshow and surveillance style footage.

Reversed texts confound preconceptions about the correct perspective from which to view the images, encouraging audiences to observe from numerous perspectives: front, behind, sideways, and through different layers of projected imagery.

The accompanying soundtrack creates a trance-like atmosphere blending slowly undulating layers of mechanical clicks and pulses with the sounds of distant bar room ambience and mysteriously indecipherable whispers.