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I am very excited to be the first artist taking part in the A Brooks Art Marfa artist residency located in Marfa West Texas USA, taking place in September 2014.

During my three-week residency I will be working on a new project: Parallax Shifts: In Search of Imagined Landscapes.

The residency will give me the opportunity to engage with the real and imagined cultural history of West Texas and the High Chihuahuan Desert. The residency, which takes place close to the border with Mexico, is an area of significant frontier history: charged with myth, fantasy and visual representations that the era of Spaghetti Western films sought to imagine and disrupt. The location of the residency is key to this project as it was the very frontier or borderland of West Texas that many of the Spaghetti Westerns located their films – despite been filmed in Italy and Spain.

During the residency I will go in search of the landscape imagined in the Spaghetti Western to make a new body of work that will build on my practice of enlivening cinematic spectral spaces. I hope to explore these imagined landscapes – sites of indeterminacy (spatially and temporally) – through a process of artistic experimentation: journeying into the desert, exploring ghost towns that no longer exist (or ever existed) and making interventions into the landscape to reveal parallax shifts.

Read more about the residency.

More on A Brooks Art Marfa artist residency.

I have recently started to turn the research I gathered on each of the locations featured in The Cinemas Project  into a historic dossier about each of the cinemas in Bendigo, Morwell, Mildura, Warrnambool, and Geelong.

The hope is that in time people with contribute their own memories of these cinemas to the website. So far dossiers on Bendigo and Mildura are available on The Cinemas Project website. 

I am back on the road in search of spectral spaces of cinema across rural Victoria, Australia between May – July 2014.

Australian Cinemas (24 Frames) is a large body of work that is producing a visual typology that indexes the sociological, cultural and historic context of rural cinema in Australia. By photographing what remains of these cinemas (or what has replaced them) I am documenting the social and geographical changes that have taken place to the landscape through the lens of ‘cinema’. The images that form Australian Cinemas (24 Frames) accentuate the dominating force of the Australian landscape, both economically and climatically, leaving the vanishing sites of cinema in its midst. In its wake is a social and geographic landscape that has been shaped by consumerism, individualism and conversely the desire for ‘sameness’. The cinemas that remain can only do so as spectres. 

Read more about Australian Cinemas (24 Frames).

A lot of the research and work investigating the history of cinema in rural Victoria for Australian Cinemas (24 Frames) became the background research and informed the The Cinemas Project: a large-scale project based in Australia commissioned by NETS Victoria, curated by Bridget Crone.

The Cinemas Project is a program of major, new contemporary artworks that explore the spaces of cinema in regional Victoria. These projects, by five of Australia’s leading contemporary artists, evoke both the mechanics of film as well as the history and present day reality of cinema. In many cases the works are housed within or make reference to cinema buildings that still stand, have vanished or have been re-purposed.

In the early days of film, movie theatres occupied a pivotal place in our communities often doubling as town halls, dance halls and even skate rinks. They were places of social gathering but also of imagination and fantasy. The Cinemas Project aims to explore and to reignite these sites of living memories, spirited visions, and future possibilities.

Each of the five artists has worked in relation to a single location. In this way the history of cinema in regional Victoria provides an impetus for the contemporary artworks that have been commissioned for The Cinemas Project. The resulting artworks provide us with imaginative relationships and reflections upon the place of cinema.

Between April – August 2014 the five new commissions curated by Bridget Crone for The Cinemas Project opened across five regional galleries in Victoria, Australia. Find out more about The Cinemas Project. 

As well as research on individual cinemas and inputting into the conceptual development for the project, I built The Cinemas Project website. More about my website work here.