Illuminate Adelaide/Insite Arts. Nexus Arts. 11 July 2024
Such a deftly simple idea.
Offer a group of artists across dance, visual arts and performance art a 3.5m round white stage, five video monitors behind them and see what they fill it with, or rather, how they envision filling the earth.
Juha Vanhakartano’s concept is one in which he allowed artists involved to bring whatever ideas and tools needed to execute their visions and remained hands off from there. Vanhakartano worked sculpting the overall concept and video design in partnership with Sound Designer/Operator Sascha Budimski and Lighting Designer/Operator Nic Mollison.
This is where the simple bit ends. Here, it’s all about the framing of images and meaning in action in this tiny stage space. Your eyes and mind are constantly at work devouring and comprehending a lot of phenomenal information.
Across seven sharply different, deeply engaging, through provoking works, Fill The Earth goes places far beyond the physical span of the space works are confined.
Visual Artist Thom Buchanan is already at work as the audience files in, performing Anthropocene Epoch.
Sit down or walk around the artist, as he etches/smudges hard and light charcoal lines into the canvas.
Buchanan is hard at work. His stained feet leave black marks, whirling about the canvas. Monitors show an overhead shot of the work. You see a white ice age world of growing cracks. Yes, this is the world. Before the world.
Yumi Umiumare’s M.M.E – My Mother Earth is the only work restricted to video monitor. The ice cold of the Anthropocene gives way to this eerie bubble shaped figure which proceeds to grow, glow in green, blue and purple to an exactingly tingling soundtrack. Awe is a good word for this piece. Umiumare manages to express the fecund nature of birthing life on bare earth that’s quite transcendent and yet primitive.
Caleena Sansbury and Adrianne Semmens’ Here, Unseen is a delicate, sparse but very rich focus on country, Kuarna Yerta country. Video footage of stick branches fused with the performers begins they piece as the offer a dance that’s very much one love for the ochre lands, the bare vegetation and so importantly as voice overs, older to younger generations chant, “our country holds our stories.” Yet they are immersed in this land, they are certainly here, but unseen.
Paulo Castro and Jo Stone’s O Sabor do meu Pomar of all the works brilliantly pulls off the challenge of framing a work and its intent differently from what is seen from audience view and what is seen in overhead shot video view.
Stone enters the stage. From her dress hem drop around a half dozen red apples. She exits, returning with a radio, a bag. Listens for radio sound. She exits twice, returning each time with a large dead apple tree limb, laying one limb on the stage dais behind her, the other in front.
This a scene of devastated earth. So smashed, unreal it’s enough to attempt sticky taping apples back onto branches to recover a sense of normal Earth. It’s as uncomfortably disconcerting, the sound of tape stretching over an apple and a tree limb as it is to watch. Stone can now lie down and look the sky. Only form overhead view on video, looking down on her and the scene, Earth looks perfect again. It’s a scarily real-time world image to ponder.
Co-director sisters Alison and Bridget Currie’s Sister of Icarus is a dive into art mythology from another angle which takes its cues from three August Rodin sculptures.
Accent is on comfort. Alison Currie and Cazna Brass play with sculptural shape using rocks, cloth a cloth enclosed sculptural form. It all seems so hard for these two to find ‘ease.’ As much as they change positions, change placement of small rocks on their bodies in Rodin imitation, nothing seems quite settled. The piece also suggestively hovers around the idea of an actual sister of Icarus falling down the rocks, not up to the sun as Icarus did. It’s beautiful, taught, lightly tragic demanding work in which being supportive and being ok is the battle.
Stephen Sheehan’s Adam is an existentially whimsical work about a man with a door. What he might find behind the door. Or not. The psychological world made physical with all its little unknown moments as he knocks on the door, peers around it, uses it as shelter from scary things.
Overhead video shots of this man/door journey are fascinating. Is Adam attempting to wall himself in or out of the world?
Lina Limosani’s Mele is totally the modern world. Grey. Angular. Fast. Unforgiving. In dancer Rowan Rossi, she has the perfect talent to execute the most brutal, sharp, savagely exact choreography seen in some time with ripping soundtrack in support. Rossi is mesmerising. He is modern man. Today. Which no one really wants to suffer being.
David O’Brien
When: Closed
Where: Nexus Arts
Bookings: Closed
