9 June – 9 August 2009
Gallery Two FlatScreen
Tuesday – Sunday 11am – 5pm
Alex Kershaw is based in Sydney and works with video and photography to generate unexpected relationships between people and their terrain. Often spending extended periods researching locations and characters, Kershaw’s quiet activism blurs the boundaries between everyday activity and devised performance as ordinary people become involved in the work.
A Lake Without Water, 2005/06
43’ 23” single screen version
9 June – 28 June
Director & Producer – Alex Kershaw
Creative Collaborator – Scott Otto Anderson
Sound Designer – Gail Priest
A Lake without Water began on Weereewa, a dry lake in the Southern NSW Tablelands, Australia. The project became a vehicle of exchange, creating new ways of being with people that live and work around the lake. In this single screen version, Weereewa becomes a theatre where the artist utilises the dry lake as a stage, instigating acts that operate as circuit breakers within the daily routines of work in and around the site. The Surveyors, auctioneers and farmers usually responsible for reducing the landscape to the exchangeable, symbolic forms of legalities, maps and currency, are recast as slapstick performers of ludic monologues and uncanny actions.
One of Several Centres, 2007/08
32’ 04” single screen version
30 June – 19 July
Kershaw extends his practice in One of Several Centres, generating performative interactions between the people who live and holiday within Alice Springs through playful interventions which are intended to shift people’s routines and the expectations surrounding the town.
Phi Ta Khon Project, 2008/09
17’ 33” single screen version
21 July – 9 August
In 2008 Kershaw travelled to Dansai, a small town in Loei Province of Northern Thailand and worked with the local council and community during their annual Phi Ta Khan festival. Translated as ‘ghosts follow people’, Phi Ta Khon combines animist, Brahmin and Buddhist traditions to articulate bonds between the dead and the living, between sexual and agricultural fertility and between the community and their spirit-infested natural world.
The Phi Ta Khon Project, orchestrates a series of displacements in the spirit of Magic Realism, weaving harvest landscapes and documents of the festival with choreographed sequences in which local farmers, food vendors and council employees are the actors and challenging traditional roles and meanings.
Programmed all the year round with new or seminal work from artists working with moving image, FlatScreen is the digital plane in Gallery Two that allows us to move fast and react to new possibilities.