Set against a stark black backdrop, the four members of Barbara Cleveland perform a literal act of disappearance. The locked off camera is placed at the beginning of a hand made cardboard tunnel, which intermittently omits an impotent puff of smoke lit up by a single light at...
In One Hour Laugh the four members of Barbara Cleveland perform a routine of endurance laughter. Over the course of the hour, their laughter travels between tedium to strain, to genuine hilarity, to humiliation. Barbara Cleveland’s unsettling laughter parodies the austerity of performance art documentation through overt theatricality and seemingly senseless enjoyment.
Videographer: William Mansfield Music Track: Runaway, Kevin Blechdom In Runaway theatricality and the filmic converge in an emotive explosion of fake blood, fake sweat and fake tits. Through the darkness a female figure runs in slow motion, spurted in blood, her top ripped open and...
This is Barbara Cleveland is the second in a series of works exploring the life and legacy of the mythic performance artist Barbara Cleveland. During a brief period from the late 1970s to the early 1980s, Cleveland is said to have produced a series of provocative, implicitly feminist performances before disappearing...
What do I do? (1970-2009) is a two-screen adaptation of two performances by Vito Acconci from the 1970s in which the artist framed simple questions and actions around the basic substance of a performance practice: to utter something; to do something. The artists fragment and repeat Acconci’s speech and actions –...
In an endurance piece of performative group work, the four members of Barbara Cleveland take turns to hammer a wooden post into the ground with a mallet. Dressed in identical blue overalls and white tee-shirts the women continue their task silently in a paddock from 6am until...
TIMMH: Study (Phase Two) explores the narratives we construct in our everyday lives to make sense of and bring coherence to an absurd existence – as defined by Albert Camus in his 1942 text ‘The Myth of Sisyphus’. In this work Camus argues the human longing for meaning amidst meaninglessness...
HokusPokus examines illusionistic and performative aspects of magic to explore human perception, senses and movement. It takes inspiration from recent neuroscientific interest in magic as a way of unraveling the relations between vision and movement in human perception. A magician appears on 3 separate screens performing tricks...
‘Aura hysterica: the sensation of an acidic burning in all the limbs, twisted and almost raw muscles; the feeling of being glass like and breakable; a fear; a retreat from movement; an unconscious confusion of gait, gestures, and movements; a will perpetually straining to perform even...
Struck is a multi-channel video and sound installation that questions how we are able to gain an ‘understanding’ of disease through interpreting medical data and imaging. The piece addresses the development and implications of visualization techniques as they are used in the detection and interpretation of...
Voice: Gerry ConnollyCamera: Chris StreweMusic: Danny Fine and David Rae
Video compilation featuring extracts from In the event of Amnesia the city will recall… The Terminal Vision Project Arrival (Keep Australia Beautiful) A Complex Collapse Filter
