The Art Newspaper

Swapping the Australian outback for London streetscapes

A new series of works by video artist Shaun Gladwell are due to debut at the Australian Centre for the Moving Image

By Elizabeth Fortescue. Web only
Published online: 05 April 2011

Shaun Gladwell, "Parallels", 2011. Courtesy the artist and Anna Schwartz Gallery

SYDNEY. Australian video artist Shaun Gladwell has moved his home and practice to east London where he is editing a series of new works for its world premiere at the Australian Centre for the Moving Image (ACMI) in Melbourne on 1 June.

The exhibition, “Shaun Gladwell: Stereo Sequences” (until 14 August), is the centre's largest ever commission from an artist and entailed Gladwell returning to Australia earlier this year where he and his small team shot footage from moving, open-sided helicopters and “Mad Max”-inspired cars, using a camera hoisted onto a crane to film a bird’s eye view of a young star of the Australian ballet.

Gladwell moved from his home town of Sydney to London at the end of 2010 to be closer to North America and Europe where his work is increasingly being shown, the artist told The Art Newspaper. Although Gladwell’s oeuvre is closely associated with the red deserts of Australian outback landscapes, such as in his 2009 Venice Biennale work, Maddestmaximvs, the artist said he will be equally at home in London as far as his work is concerned.

“All of my projects, before the work that really did look at Australian landscapes, was really connected to urbanism and the city,” said Gladwell. “I had this fascination with particular activity in urban environments. I’m certainly interested in responding to environments wherever they are. So it’s still chasing the same logic, it will just be that I’m having a chance to have a look at what’s taking place in London at the moment.”

The seven video works Gladwell shot for “Stereo Sequences” include Pataphysical Ceiling, a multi-channel video installation depicting the human body executing various types of spins and pirouettes.

“It’s almost like an index or archive of different spinning movements, from people riding bicycles, to skateboards, to capoeira to classical ballet,” said Gladwell. “There’s an interest in how all of these different movements can involve a spinning action, and I love setting up a kind of comparative study between those different kinds of spinning movements.”

In the six-screen video installation, Parallels, Gladwell and another member of his team filmed one another simultaneously from helicopters, cars and other types of vehicles as they moved in tandem. Each person’s footage will be displayed on opposite sides of a corridor at the ACMI, where Gladwell said the audience will be “caught in the crossfire of these two gazes.”

“It’s a very basic contradiction that happens, where you get these vehicles that are moving quite rapidly through space, but their relationship to each other is fixed, like a zero relative speed, and I just love that look where you have a background that’s scrolling by but the cameras are looking at each other in relative stillness.”