Sighing :: Just out of earshot

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The moments when a fragile tension is broken, regrets for lost dreams, unrealised attractions, a wish for meaning and pattern in a life of increasing chaos, a simple desire to be somewhere else. Each moment has an experience of longing embedded in its logic. For some the pairing of beauty and loss creates a tang of melancholy, nostalgia. For others a search for the unattainable 'object' is a motivating drive that is creative as well as potentially escapist.

Independent curator Ali Bramwell has collected five works that use touch and repetition to explore forms of sublimated desire. The works in the exhibition share a similar approach, they are the results of documenting a physical process. Each process anchors a different moment of longing concretely, desire that is not abstract but embodied.

Sighing :: Just out of earshot was shown at Blue Oyster Gallery, Dunedin, New Zealand. 23 October - 10 November 2007

 

 

Gordana Andelic Galic

(Bosnia & Herzegovina)
Lost-Found, 2004 by Gordana Andelic Galic. In the time of globalisation and creation of new world order, particularly affected are the so-called countries in transition. Especially those, such as countries of former Yugoslavia, which also suffered a long and brutal war. Amongst them, Bosnia and Herzegovina was affected most severely. The price of transition are burned households and vanished families, destroyed economy but also blooming of crime, newly emerged general economical and physical insecurity, 1.5 million displaced people and ruthless abuse of all human rights. In the face of the new reality Andelic Galic reacts with both pathos and humor. Lost-Found is documentation of an advertisement placed in the lost /found personal column.
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Viel Bjerkeset Andersen

(Norway)
Morpheus tale, 2007 by Viel Bjerkeset-Anderson shows the inevitable loss of ephemeral beauty played out and held in an attenuated moment. Bjerkeset-Anderson is interested in the video presence as a thin layer, airy, a kind of hovering image that undermines the material nature of the loss depicted. She does not allow the viewer to forget that they are observing a construction.

 

Lisa Benson

(New Zealand)
Lost in Space, 2006 by Lisa Benson is a set of pinhole photographs from night long exposures of the night sky at Mount John Observatory. A process of capturing and freezing very slow movement together with sensation of profound distance and isolation.
   

Neil Berecry-Brown & Jieon Lee

(Australia & SouthKorea)
Rehearsed ellipsis, 2005 by Neil Berecry-Brown and Jieon Lee maps a blind collusion, a beguiled occlusion loop for two players. The two are intently aware of one another but do not acknowledge or approach, instead they repeat their separate arcs of movement. A watcher and watched in a moment of tension that remains unresolved, unfinished, provisional, and slightly feral.
 

Thom Vink & Saara Ekström

(Netherlands & Finland)

Dust, 2007 by Thom Vink and Saara Ekström maps emergence of pattern from that most overlooked and derided household substance, dust. Vink and Ekström introduce a conflicted desire for pattern and ornamentation, dirty ornamentation, in a literal sense. The work is also a sardonic reference to how artistic tendency towards decoration and embellishment fell into intellectual disrepute.
   
 
 

Sighing :: Just out of earshot was shown at Blue Oyster Gallery, Dunedin, New Zealand. 23 October - 10 November 2007


 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 


 

©2005 Ali Bramwell copyright statement • contact