John Gillies’ Road Movie (part 1) is about cars: a portrait of a seething mass of steel- cased bubbles and the people inside them who are hurtled along at high speeds only to come to a crashing halt and find themselves stuck in the drawn out nothing time of the traffic jam. It’s a collage of the small gestures of driving that flesh out this everyday activity and the collections of objects that fill the world of cars, the worlds we create within cars. It’s a video about cultural attachment

to the car, the identification of self with cars. It invokes the grand twentieth century dream of taking the exit lane, hitting the open road, escaping, moving, changing, moving on ... And it’s about the end of that road.

A world without cars – is it a dream or a nightmare? It is precisely this question that drives the protagonist of Gillies’ road movie as he takes the exit lane and, like many travelers before him, heads away from the city and out on to the open road.

Therese Davis, Video Logic catalogue, Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney, 2008, pp. 45.