Shared Reckonings: Catherine Truman at the Museum of Economic Botany

  • Shared Reckonings
  • Restless Calm
  • Ghost
  • Eclipse

Santos Museum of Economic Botany and The Deadhouse, Adelaide Botanic Gardens.
24 February – Sunday 2 May, 2021

In Shared Reckonings, renowned South Australian artist, Catherine Truman, explores the impact of light on human vision and the growth of plants. The exhibition combines thermoplastics and photo-luminescent powders with exquisite, thought-provoking results. Catherine’s work, which is presented as part of the Adelaide Festival, was created following two concurrent residencies at the Botanic Gardens and State Herbarium, and the Flinders Centre for Ophthalmology at Flinders University. It was influenced by powerful themes: the catastrophic bushfires that swept the country last summer, climate change-induced biodiversity loss, and the global pandemic.

I’ve been fortunate to have … Click here for more.

floodtide exhibited in Berlin

My video floodtide has been selected to be shown at the Gallery for Sustainable Art in Berlin as part of their 1.5 degrees international exhibition, running from 15 January – 12 March 2021. The exhibition is about whether or not we reach our climate goal and includes object, installation, photo, painting, video, and readings.

floodtide imagines a city in the near future when sea levels have risen significantly. What does it look like? How will we cope?

The composition process making the video was very complex. Nearly every scene has been composited from multiple sources requiring more than 500 individual sequences from original footage filmed around Adelaide, the Fleurieu Peninsula, Inner Suburban Melbourne, the Western Highway, and Far North Queensland. … Click here for more.

accidentals (recalculated) in Rochford Street Review

Rochford Street Review is a fabulous on-line journal highlighting Australian and International Literature, Art and Culture – with an emphasis on small press and grassroots cultural activities, run by the indefatigable Mark Roberts. So I’m super pleased that he has featured one of my more complex video poems accidentals (recalculated) in Issue 30 of the Review. This will be the first of five videos that will appear here.

The video was a finalist in the Carbon Culture Review 2016 Poetry Film Contest (USA); was exhibited at 17 Days (Day 9, Vol. 10) at The Bret Llewellyn Art Gallery, Alfred State College, NY (USA; August 28 – September 19, 2017) and Atrium Gallery, Western Michigan University (USA; November … Click here for more.

Sent From Elsewhere poetry and music with Frédéric Iriarte now out on Bandcamp

Sent From Elsewhere is a major collaboration with Swedish/French musician/artist Frédéric Iriarte that we have been working on for most of 2020. When we started this, we decided to make tracks that sounded different from anything we’d do by ourselves. So here are complex improvisations, radical remixes, and strange texts, using vocal effects that I’d been thinking about for ages… We are both very happy with the result!!

The album consists of 9 tracks, featuring Frédéric on guitars, basses, saxophones, keyboard, piano, flute, Jew’s harp, harmonica, vibraphone, FX and percussion. I did the vocal performances, played a few bits, and put the lot together in sometimes major remixes.

… Click here for more.

ISOLATION PROCEDURES in Spanish at Helios Sun Poetry Film Festival

After screening at the Festival Fotogenia 2020 in Mexico City, my the Spanish version of my video ISOLATION PROCEDURES / PROCEDIMIENTOS DE AISLAMIENTO is an official selection screening at the Helios Sun Poetry Film Festival also in Mexico City in December, 2020. The Spanish version of the text is integrated into the video, as part of my long slow project on exploring how text and image can interact. 

The Long Slow Effect of Gravity at Queensland Poetry Festival 2020

My video The Long Slow Effect of Gravity is a finalist at the Queensland Poetry Festival 2020 Film and Poetry Challenge. (click on this link to see all the finalists).

The footage was taken around Adelaide CBD, Belair, Blackwood, Sturt River, Mount Compass and Middleton, all in South Australia, and Athens, Greece. The soundtrack is in polyrhythmic 6/4 time and contains audio samples of bird calls, rain, and various falling objects recorded in Belair, South Australia.

Thanks to QPF for promoting video in a mainstream poetry festival! Indeed, showing some of my early videos at QPF in 2014 gave me the confidence that I probably really could do this stuff…

unvoiced at the 2020 Film and Video Poetry Symposium

unvoiced is made from the text of Articles 18 – 22 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, having removed all the vowels, rendering the text unvoiced. 

This is a form of redaction, whereby ruling bodies erase portions of publicly available text deemed to be against national interest or community standards or the well-being of holders of high office or whatever. Yet this reduced, redacted text can still be spoken, albeit by a computer algorithm that does its best to articulate what remains, to give some kind of voice to the unvoiced. 

Visualising the outcome of this process employs the imagery of video streaming and surveillance in a world where bandwidth and access can be reduced or cut off at … Click here for more.

ISOLATION PROCEDURES Official Selection in Festival Fotogenia 2020 in Mexico.

When I made my video “ISOLATION PROCEDURES”, we were in the early stages of COVID-19 close-down here in South Australia and I wondered what would happen if the laws necessary for restricting the spread of the virus became entrenched in a more authoritarian government regime. With things getting worse around the world on many levels, it seems opportune that my video has been selected for screening at the 2020 Fotogenia International Festival of Film Poetry and Divergent Narratives in Mexico City in November. Rather than subtitling the video in Spanish, I’ve integrated a Spanish version of the text into the video, as part of my long slow project on exploring how text and image can interact. For more information on … Click here for more.

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