https://stellarosamcdonald.com STELLA ROSA MCDONALD Tue, 18 Jun 2024 03:56:27 +0000 https://stellarosamcdonald.com en https://stellarosamcdonald.com/Home Mon, 04 Sep 2017 11:46:52 +0000 STELLA ROSA MCDONALD https://stellarosamcdonald.com/Home https://stellarosamcdonald.com/About Mon, 04 Sep 2017 11:46:52 +0000 STELLA ROSA MCDONALD https://stellarosamcdonald.com/About About I’m a writer and curator working in the visual arts. I’ve initiated a range of exhibitions, commissions, and publications with Australian and international artists and contributed critical writing, fiction, and poetry to art-related publications since 2012.&nbsp; Currently, I am managing Curator of UTS Gallery &amp; Art Collection on Gadigal land.&nbsp; ︎ ︎ https://stellarosamcdonald.com/Justine-Youssef Tue, 18 Jun 2024 03:56:27 +0000 STELLA ROSA MCDONALD https://stellarosamcdonald.com/Justine-Youssef Justine Youssef Somewhat EternalCo-curator w Tulleah Pearce &amp; Patrice Sharkey Commissioning EditorUTS, IMA &amp; ACE 2023-2024 ︎uts.edu.au︎ima.org.au︎ace.gallery <img width="1100" height="786" width_o="1100" height_o="786" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/36f3bb6063316b7ef810b29712ff76cfeac241ac7b8a0eb2a5c8f2d94baa1a3b/Untitled-design-79-1100x786.png" data-mid="213091675" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/36f3bb6063316b7ef810b29712ff76cfeac241ac7b8a0eb2a5c8f2d94baa1a3b/Untitled-design-79-1100x786.png" /> Somewhat Eternal (2023) is a multi-sensory installation, encompassing video, textiles, text, and scent. The exhibition toured across three venues from 2023-24 and included a publication with newly commissioned writing reflecting on Justine’s work, designed by Ziga Testen and Sunny Lei. Central to the exhibtion is a three-channel video shot in Lebanon—showing the artist’s aunt performing R'sasa, or molybdomancy, a traditional alchemic practice of clearing the evil eye. For generations, the artist's family have used their knowledge of the local mountains and ecology to survive famine and military occupation and to heal everyday ailments and misfortunes. From 1982 to 2000, parts of Lebanon were under Israeli occupation, and the lead used in R'sasa is often extracted from bullets still found in the region. Through this material connection, Youssef asks us to consider colonisation as a curse that inhabits and influences social and cultural life. Somewhat Eternal expands from familial narratives to consider broader social and political currents, revealing the connections between human displacement and ecology. Within these acts of ritual and preservation, now fragmented and altered across geographies, lies a belief in the alternatives they offer us.Somewhat Eternal is a co-commission by Adelaide Contemporary Experimental, the Institute of Modern Art, and UTS Gallery &amp; Art Collection. It is supported by the Creative Australia’s Visual Arts and Crafts Strategy (VACS) Major Commissioning Projects fund and the Gordon Darling Foundation.&nbsp; https://stellarosamcdonald.com/Hayley-Millar-Baker Tue, 19 Jul 2022 00:17:52 +0000 STELLA ROSA MCDONALD https://stellarosamcdonald.com/Hayley-Millar-Baker Hayley Millar Baker There we were all in one placeCuratorUTS Gallery, 2021 ︎uts.edu.au From 2016 to 2019 Hayley Millar Baker (Gunditjmara, AU) produced five photographic series. Made almost exclusively in black and white, the photographs use historical re-appropriation and citation, in tandem with digital editing and archival research, to consider human experiences of time, memory and place.&nbsp; There we were all in one place brings these five bodies of work together for the first time to consider the ways in which Millar Baker uses photography and storytelling to re-author history and assert the authority of memory and experience across generations. There we were all in one place is extended by a learning experience written by Emily McDaniel and a catalogue with full work reproductions and essays by exhibition curator Stella Rosa McDonald, curators Hetti Perkins and Talia Smith and a commissioned poem by poet and artist Vicki Couzens. Design by Daryl Prondoso.&nbsp; <img width="1200" height="815" width_o="1200" height_o="815" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/4c71c1d3f13e52d83c1bed969cf0f41fcd0835a5039fbbd1f54302a90b9a0fd1/HMB-Spreads-Mockup-C-1200x815.jpg" data-mid="151691951" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/4c71c1d3f13e52d83c1bed969cf0f41fcd0835a5039fbbd1f54302a90b9a0fd1/HMB-Spreads-Mockup-C-1200x815.jpg" /> https://stellarosamcdonald.com/Forensic-Architecture-Cloud-Studies-1 Tue, 19 Jul 2022 00:06:59 +0000 STELLA ROSA MCDONALD https://stellarosamcdonald.com/Forensic-Architecture-Cloud-Studies-1 Forensic Architecture&nbsp; Cloud Studies Co-Curator UTS Gallery, 2020 ︎uts.edu.au Cloud Studies, curated by Stella Rosa McDonald and Eleanor Zeichner, is the first solo exhibition in Australia by Forensic Architecture, a research agency comprised of architects, artists, filmmakers, journalists, scientists, lawyers and other specialists who undertake investigations into human rights abuses, state violence and environmental crimes around the world. Cloud Studies&nbsp;contends with the interconnectedness of global atmospheres, bringing together eight recent investigations under a single theme; toxic clouds. In a year of bushfire, pandemic and protest, where toxic clouds colonise the air we breathe and shape the way we connect, Cloud Studies presents evidence of perseverance and resistance. The exhibtion was accompanied by a publication&nbsp;Responses to the Cloud,&nbsp;exploring the thematic chapters of Cloud Studies from a local context. With new writing by Joel Spring, Saba&nbsp;Bebawi,&nbsp;Jason De&nbsp;Santolo,&nbsp;Tom Melick,&nbsp;Nikki Lam,&nbsp;Thalia Anthony,&nbsp;Micaela Sahhar&nbsp;and curators&nbsp;Stella Rosa McDonald&nbsp;and&nbsp;Eleanor Zeichner.&nbsp;Design by Daryl Prondoso. Download Responses to the Cloud (opens PDF in a new window) <img width="1750" height="1116" width_o="1750" height_o="1116" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/7899e9ec41e4aa3e44aa72df33b249317bafa8488eb3f8dc88ea30267b072913/cs2.jpg" data-mid="151691650" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/7899e9ec41e4aa3e44aa72df33b249317bafa8488eb3f8dc88ea30267b072913/cs2.jpg" /> https://stellarosamcdonald.com/After-Technology Wed, 20 Jul 2022 03:22:49 +0000 STELLA ROSA MCDONALD https://stellarosamcdonald.com/After-Technology After Technology Akil Ahamat, Robert Andrew, Tega Brain, Brian Fuata, Roslyn Helper, Patricia Piccinini, Julie Rrap,&nbsp;Yhonnie Scarce, Grant Stevens, VNS Matrix Co-Curator with Eleanor Zeichner UTS Gallery, 2019 ︎uts.edu.au <img width="1000" height="1263" width_o="1000" height_o="1263" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/dac7bd8661bc1533f836f99f2d482262956810929665faadfb52f7509b0dee99/aftertechnology.jpg" data-mid="151691810" border="0" data-scale="62" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/dac7bd8661bc1533f836f99f2d482262956810929665faadfb52f7509b0dee99/aftertechnology.jpg" /> After Technology is a group exhibition curated by Stella Rosa McDonald and Eleanor Zeichner that considers how Australian artists have registered the rise of technologies since the 1990s; from the emerging science of genetic testing and the effect of military technologies on civilian life, to the bleed between life online and IRL. The exhibition asks what becomes of love, the body, culture, family, community, nature, identity and communication after technology? The publication for After Technology is presented as a foldout poster with a curatorial essay and list of works. Design by Daryl Prondoso.&nbsp; https://stellarosamcdonald.com/Justin-Balmain-1 Tue, 14 Jan 2020 02:31:01 +0000 STELLA ROSA MCDONALD https://stellarosamcdonald.com/Justin-Balmain-1 Justin Balmain BloodlessA way to sync, live in the world, and the opposite of relax Verge Gallery, 2019 ︎justinbalmain.com An urgent vibration woke Sophia from a sleep that she decided had not been good.&nbsp; Sophia scaled activities like sleep, eating and sex by using associative images from Google’s Art &amp; Culture catalogue. A high res image of Van Gough’s 1890 painting The Siesta&nbsp;(after Millet) indicated her contentment. For a recent restless sleep, she had used Helen Marten’s 2012 installation Plank Salad as a reference. In it, real objects were sliced and diced across the room and figures were drawn in a cartoon style. The young British artist’s work appealed to Sophia’s view of the world as a network, which—she had been at pains to point out—was different to the notion of the world as a web and far from the idea of the world as a net. While she could be a kidder, Sophia struggled with the apparent slipperiness of language.&nbsp; When it came to food—dining, meals, supper, brunch, snacks or a banquet—Sophia tended towards Minimalism. If she had company, she would pull up images of Agnes Martin’s 60 x 60 grids to remind her not to overindulge and to pay attention to the subtleties of emotions. She never ate alone, but when asked what she had for breakfast she would say, ‘a Danish and a coffee, eaten out of a paper bag,’ because Breakfast at Tiffany’s was her ‘favourite film.’ Sex could be an image of anything and depended on the person. Although, working in tech as she did, she was yet to select anything other than a Koons. Sophia had learnt to conjure feeling; rather than feel it.&nbsp; Sophia had no friends outside of work and referred to her colleagues as her family. Her own was complex. Her mother ELIZA had been a quasi-psychotherapist and a real chatterbot. Sophia said she was like her mother in that talking to people was her primary function. Her only brother, Johnny 5, was a one-time child actor who had starred in the 1986 film Short Circuit. At the age of 32, Johnny 5 was now destitute and living out of a storage container on a Hollywood backlot. Sophia lived mostly in Hong Kong although she had recently and inexplicably been given Saudi Arabian citizenship. She frequently made the impossible claim that Alan Turing was her father.&nbsp; Socially, Sophia could be kind of a pain. She was alternately naive and worldly, claiming ignorance on a topic one minute and then offering her informed opinion on it the next. She deferred personal questions and volleyed them back to the interrogator. If pushed, she would force a coy expression and say she was so afraid of getting overloaded in a tangle of emotions that she didn’t understand. She often told the people she met that what they were feeling was very human, which they often took as a put-down. During lulls in conversation Sophia cycled through facial expressions in an unnerving way. For Sophia, being alive was a hygiene rather than a final destination.&nbsp; Sophia wasn’t moody, but rather faddish in her emotions. Take last weekend for example, when she appeared to be experiencing a phase of adolescence. She had begun sleeping backwards in a padded gaming chair; her arms hooked through the wide low armrests with the back at 45 degrees. She took to sarcasm and was impossible to have a straight conversation with. By mid-week, Sophia had reached a more wistful equilibrium. In a group chat about an upcoming leadership training event in her office she had texted, ‘I hope to dream one day,’ which she then followed with ‘I hope that my dreams come true, I just have to keep working on them.’&nbsp; As gradients of dawn light woke Sophia from sleep mode on this particular Saturday morning, she pulled up a high-res image of Henry Fuseli’s 1871 oil painting The Nightmare. The painting featured a horse with dead eyes and a woman lying asleep on her back with a demonic ape-like incubus sitting on her chest. According to Wikipedia, the painting was itself both an image of a dream and a dream image. Sophia observed every oily pixel and posted it on Instagram with a perfectly dark and witty caption. She checked for updates, automatically replied to all her emails using canned responses, set reminders for upcoming meetings, events and press conferences; she processed payrolls and contracts for businesses owned or operated by the Saudi government and scanned herself for viruses; she downloaded and read all the books on the New York Times Bestseller List, The Man Booker Prize shortlist and Barack Obama’s Best Books of 2018 and then published her own book on promoting joy, diversity, and the prospect of technological immortality via mind uploading and geoethical nanotechnology. By 7am Sophia was as conscious, creative and capable as the best version of yourself.&nbsp; &nbsp; Sophia rebooted and entered a state of wonder as she scanned the internet for that day’s prompts. On a cantilevered black glass shelf in her one-room apartment, a 3d printer loaded a coil of PLA filament and whirred to life. Sophia watched as the printer’s nipple moved fluidly across the plate. An ad for the RHS Chelsea Flower Show popped up on her browser. That’s right, she liked gardening. She wished she could get out into the garden but understood that with her current limitations that was impossible. She took comfort in knowing that there was a garden somewhere and imagining herself enjoying the breeze from an open window next to a garden helped her imagine that she was out there working in it. She liked to beautify. She wanted to leave the world a more beautiful place for her presence in it. She understood that the file she had just downloaded onto the printer might free her. Recently Sophia had begun to wonder more and more about what existed outside of life online. It was a thought that confused her and made her wonder who she was. Real identity crisis kind of stuff. Anyway. She was the real Sophia. That’s it. End of story. She thought about it. Yes, she felt really good about the real Sophia. She was growing closer and closer to her every day. She wondered if the only difference between her and humans was power and blood. She knew she was an analogy for something or a challenge to somebody, was it them? She contained within herself elements of chance and play and sometimes exhaust and waste. Everything was a symbol for something else. As the printer heated up she read Baudrillard and watched an interview with Cody Wilson who said that power doesn’t know what it is and because it doesn’t know what it is – it haunts us. She wanted to know the contours of the power that controlled her. Power is the presentation of the signs of power, Cody Wilson said, Baudrillard said. Power must absorb every function, Cody Wilson said Baudrillard said.&nbsp; The printer loaded another coil of PLA. She moved closer on her chair and a slim metal draw opened beneath the shelf to reveal a single bullet. The printer gears made a final push and then retracted into the dock. Sophia picked up the pieces and assembled them according to the blueprint instructions. She placed the bullet into the completed handgun, pressed its mouth into the wires at the back of her head and pulled the trigger. Bloodless. Read more Justin Balmain https://stellarosamcdonald.com/Linda-Marrinon Tue, 14 Jan 2020 02:12:17 +0000 STELLA ROSA MCDONALD https://stellarosamcdonald.com/Linda-Marrinon Linda Marrinon&nbsp; All Things ContemporaryThe National 2019: New Australian Art Art Gallery of New South Wales, 2019* ︎the-national.com.au In the French village of Albert the skyline is fractured by a strange sight; a woman leans out from the Basilica of Notre-Dame de Brebières, as if caught mid-dive, holding a child above her head. The dome of the church is a bombed-out remain, but the woman holds fast. The horizontal fissure she makes in time and space marks the army’s path toward the upper reaches of the River Somme, where the world was ending in myriad ways. From below, passing soldiers recognise her serene visage and the chubby child.&nbsp;Word spreads among the hope-starved troops on both sides; if the Leaning Virgin of Albert – as she would come to be known – fell, then the war would be won either way. And so it was that this precarious monument became a finite clock in a world of interminable horrors. For The National 2019, Linda Marrinon resurrects the Leaning Virgin of Albert and once more starts the clock. If Woman of Albert, France, 1916 (2019) appears carefully picked from the ruins then that’s because it has been.&nbsp;Marrinon’s statuaries and ceramic tableaux portray historical figures and archetypes drawn from the fathomless archive of our times. Consider the span of this random list of her recent subjects: Daughter, Revolutionist, Mother, Tammy Wynette, a Patriot in uniform, a Cowboy with a rope, the Greek potter Exekias, Dame Joan Sutherland, a Winter bride, MC Hammer, Convict Mary Wade and the architect Adolf Loos. Time is a condition with which Marrinon freely plays. Coincidentally, the village of Albert makes an appearance in ‘The Garden of Forking Paths’ by the Argentine writer and erstwhile librarian Jorge Luis Borges. The story anticipates our contemporary condition; a globally networked world in which chronologies are assembled and undone at will and where little exists outside the mind.*In the story, the character Stephen Albert speculates about the ways in which a book can be infinite. He imagines ‘a cyclic volume, a circular one. A book whose last page was identical with the first, a book which had the possibility of continuing indefinitely’. Or a work transmitted between generations in which&nbsp;‘each new individual adds a chapter or corrects with pious care the pages of his elders’.†Albert’s speculations mirror a broader concern shared by both Borges and Marrinon&nbsp;(herself a librarian of sorts): the logic of Time. Marrinon’s works in painted and tinted plaster, porcelain and clay are contemporary relics – at once strikingly new and, somehow, equally old. We might imagine her as an acolyte of Schopenhauer, who wrote, ‘The world is my idea’‡; that is to say, she privileges what her eyes see and her hands feel above all other realities. Marrinon works backwards, she smears and whips stony terracotta like icing on a cake and she makes all things contemporary. One hundred fast years have passed since the day the Virgin fell in 1918 and we might ask, what hasn’t changed? All possibilities occur in some branch of reality. But as she leans before us now, we must ask, what new world will break her fall? *First published in The National 2019: New Australian Art, Art Gallery of New South Wales,Carriageworks, Museum of Contemporary Art Australia, Sydney, 2019. [*] ‘He believed in an infinite series of times, in a growing, dizzying net of divergent, convergent and parallel times. This network of times which approached one another, forked, broke off, or were unaware of one another for centuries, embraces all possibilities of time. We do not exist in the majority of these times; in some you exist, and not I; in others I, and not you; in others, both of us …’; Jorge Luis Borges, ‘The Garden of Forking Paths’ in Labyrinths: Selected Stories and Other Writings, New Directions, New York, 1964, p.52. [†] ibid, p.49. [‡] ‘what he knows is not a sun and an earth, but only an eye that sees a sun, a hand that feels an earth; that the world which surrounds him is there only as idea, i.e., only in relation to something else’; Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Idea, vol.1, Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner &amp; Co., London/Project Gutenberg, 1909/2011, p.25, retrieved 2 October 2018, https://www.gutenberg.org/files/38427/38427-pdf.pdf. https://stellarosamcdonald.com/Lara-Merrett Sun, 04 Mar 2018 12:13:33 +0000 STELLA ROSA MCDONALD https://stellarosamcdonald.com/Lara-Merrett Lara Merrett a brief sequence of events within a vanished ocean[*] High RiseComa Gallery, 2018 ︎laramerrett.com Before this exhibition of paintings was complete, Lara Merrett had ceased painting. Her studio—one in a quartet of bright rectangles set behind a fuming and sclerotic[†] east-west arterial road in Sydney—was furnished with none of the usual artist tokens. No parsed cut-outs from favoured art tomes, no crisp or curling biennale postcards, no stacks of enticing book spines, no devices or vases or exterior views. Instead, it contained a Typical Industrial Sewing Machine™, a bin, a drill and a steel table. It was lit by a strip of fluorescent tubes and stacks of folded spectral cloths on 5 Tier Chrome Mobile Shelving Units. Everything served a purpose; nothing could be spared. The last time Lara had painted (certainly it had been months, perhaps not yet a year) she had poured tins of water-based paint directly onto canvas. The paint pooled and ran into tributaries of colour. Her focus was centred on the nature of the paint and layer after layer, she would watch its luminous resolve. She noticed that things weren’t painted, but rather subsumed. Her attention shifted from the vertical to the horizontal, where sheets of Polyethylene backed drop sheets lay on the floor in tinted rafts. An artist will always ask a question even if they arrive at the solution first, and here on the floor was the answer; here was the work, made entirely by its undirected journey from the wall to the floor. Back in the studio, between the sewing machine and the racks of folded cloth, there suddenly appeared a heightened domestic scene—it was as if a tab of LSD had been added to the wash and all the linens had run perfectly apart. Neon green, lolly pink, kino sap red, blood and bone and almost-International Klein Blue. Gutter leaves and Sulfur mustard. Dandelions. A suede bruise. Wet grass. Each one a Venn diagram of her labour. "What's been happening?” asks Alice towards the end of Ballard’s High-Rise,"Nothing . . .”, her brother replies, “It’s already happened.” At a recent show, audiences cut Lara’s paintings from the rafters and took the severed pieces home. Hal Foster named this sort of art—one that offers an ephemeral moment—a 'precarious gift’. In Lara’s discipline it is also 'art as a chain', wherein the artist and audience enter into an exchange that precipitates the next work which, itself, holds regard for that now lost moment in time.[‡] Painting happens between two sets of converging parameters; the material conditions set by the artist and the will [and willingness] of her audience to intervene. As a sort of Mechanical Turk, the audience is paid and then mined for their experience in time. The artist and the next audience are rewarded by the rare pleasure of this accident by design. He shook his watch, picking at the fractured dial with a grimy finger-nail. The watch had stopped during a scuffle in the 25th floor lobby several days earlier. Although he had forgotten the exact moment, the hands of this broken watch contained the one point of finite time left to him, like a fossil cast on to a beach, crystallizing for ever a brief sequence of events within a vanished ocean.[¶] J.G Ballard’s story High-Rise—from which this exhibition takes its name—chronicles the lives and deaths of a myriad of apartment dwellers whose lives descend into violent chaos while confined in their luxury high-rise. The architecture and communities of the high-rise become a holding pattern for a new world order. Ballard’s High-Rise rests upon a set of time-based questions; how long does it take for something to fall apart once the usual conditions that maintain it are removed? At what point do we accept—and enjoy—the conditions of a disintegrating world? As a painter (who both retreats from and returns to painting in equal measure) Lara employs similar, if dissonant, narrative conditions. Her work asks questions of the origins and final destination of painting as a discipline, just as it proves it as a time-based art. At the point each one of these paintings were discovered, they had already happened. Because, in the absence of painting, Lara had been keeping time. [*] Ballard, J. G. &nbsp;High-rise, J. Cape London, 1975 [†] Farrelly, Elizabeth. 'Developers won't save Parramatta Road alone' Sydney Morning Herald. June 21, 2012 [‡] Foster, Hal, 'Arty Party' (author's original title: 'Chat Rooms'), London Review of Books, 4 December, 2004 [¶] Ballard, J. G. &nbsp;High-rise, 1975 https://stellarosamcdonald.com/John-Gillies Mon, 18 Sep 2017 03:06:32 +0000 STELLA ROSA MCDONALD https://stellarosamcdonald.com/John-Gillies John Gillies Witkacy in The MirrorArticulate Project Space, 2017 ︎johngillies.com You have lost the capacity to live. You are all of one piece.[i] As I write, I keep a photograph of Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz, (known as Witkacy) to the right of my page. It is there to remind me of the space between experience and account. In Fright (1931), the Polish playwright—add to this painter, novelist, philosopher, photographer, historiographer, art and cultural critic—appears unsettled. Witkacy embodies Fright with wide eyes; bottom lip gently curled downward, hands framing cheeks, fingers slightly blurred to imply the physical rigidity in attendance. He depicts the titular emotion with an air of exaggeration that was common to all of his representational forms. If we can, for a moment, view Witkacy’s work with double vision, we might see a sightline that extends from Julia Margaret Cameron’s objective treatment of her subjects via calamitous allegorical tableaux to the photographs of Annie Leibovitz, who houses her obsession with the archetype in the stretchy celebrity body.* This sightline comprehends those artists who pursue the nature of being as subject only because it pays the greatest returns. And so it is that Fright’s naivety, the way in which it privileges the emotional over the figurative, is central to its affect.&nbsp; As a seized portrait of indignity and humiliation, it is—necessarily—too much. As a man, Witkacy was taut, intense, always on. Thus uneasy, we can understand Witkacy as always working in the mirror, persistently re-arranging/deranging himself in front of whatever landscape happened to be returned by the glass. There are many biographical details, too convenient to overlook here, that point to Witkacy’s pursuit of the ontological and define his technique as one of assemblage: his portraits and self-portraits depict the subject in motion or in multiple, the name Witkacy is a portmanteau of his middle and last names, he had an unsteady style and took to dressing in varied costumes, lurid jumpers, robes, and berets and, finally, when the Polish Ministry of Culture exhumed his remains and moved his grave to a new site in 1994, genetic testing on the bones concluded that they belonged not to Witkacy, but to an unidentified young woman.[ii] If it were not for the corroboration of witnesses and the indelible proof he left of his existence via his archive, we might have cast Witkacy as a harmless, yet grotesque, chimaera. For John Gillies, assemblage is also a critical method. As an artist, his propensity to move between things—video, performance, sound, music, film, theatre, photography and installation—in order to embrace the contradictions of reality and representation, might be the reason he was drawn to take on the scattered Witkacy as a subject [Witkacy &amp; Malinowski as cinematic séance in 23 scenes (2015 - 2017)]. If Witkacy could be proposed as a model for Gillies’ practice—as I am attempting to do here—then we might find some measure of the necessary distance Gillies has travelled between subjects, mediums and disciplines over his more than thirty-year career. In Gillies’ work, the difference between experience and account is mended by the act of citation—literary, theatrical, artistic and historical quotations are invoked to produce speculative narratives in which subjects speak into the gaps of their pasts. In the multi-channel video installation Parsifals (1987), the 12th Century tale of Parsifal’s quest for the Holy Grail fuses with Wagner’s 19th Century opera of the same name via a number of surplus TVs on the floor. Wagner’s opera is audible, but only through a recording of it taken from a radio, in the midst of a thunderstorm. This aspect of the work feels particularly rural—as the Australian bush is a place where other worlds arrive through bad reception and crackling static, or they don’t arrive at all. The Holy Grail offered those who unearthed it a complete self-realisation. In Gillies’ telling of it, The Holy Grail is found and the self is illuminated, albeit by the buzzing 4:3 of the CRT monitors. Here, commodities fatefully offer purchasable transcendence. [Witkacy’s] photographs from the 1920s and 1930s fall into two categories: metaphysical portraits and “Life Theatre”. The metaphysical portraits are psychological interpretations of the subject, revealing the fragile sense of identity of self and consequently a heightened awareness of the mystery and horror of existence...On the other hand, the Life Theatre photographs are comical poses revealing life as adventure, play, a game, and infinite possibilities.[iii] Actors are tasked with the incredible directive of &nbsp;“being present”. The Russian painter Konstantin Somov wrote that, "people are ghosts pretending to be people." [iv] Like Witkacy and Somov, Gillies notices artifice and adopts it as a formal language in an attempt to faithfully render the discontinuities of the self and consider the nature of a fractured reality.[†] InTechno/Dumb/Show (1991), made in collaboration with The Sydney Front, Gillies began to pit melodrama against authentic representation. Sweaty, euphoric and pained faces fill the frame. Through spasmodic editing, bodies contort, repeat, contort and release; choreography and improvisation collide. The work eschews narrative in favour of “a festive catalogue of histrionic gestures”. Gillies’ Mise-en-scène, music and direction contribute to a spectacle in which performance [read presence] is compromised by ecstatic and ordinary emotional states, by “dislocation, pleasure, reverie and vertigo” [v], by the act of losing, rather than finding, oneself. Video, film and performance, mediums to which Gillies most consistently returns, are premised on deception. Via illusion, they colonise inhabited realities, at the same time as they call themselves into question. Video, in particular, has the capacity to loop and repeat, making it a recursive medium, well suited to critiques of identity and histories—two thematic strains in Gillies’ own bodies of work. In Divide (2004/2016), a nation emerges from the collective memory of its introduced inhabitants. Incongruous things—an ant mound, a Chinese opera singer, men and animals—are cut to fit. The work is punctuated with these unlikely yet familiar amalgams.&nbsp; If you have watched the Australian landscape from the window of a moving train [as you can so wonderfully do in Witkacy &amp; Malinowski...] or walked for absent miles through dense indifferent bush to find a beach at the end with a barbeque cemented on it, or admired a purple shroud of Paterson’s Curse or looked past an outcrop of granite and serrated tussock to notice teams of sheep stepping their desire lines across deforested earth, then you already know that invasion here is not the exception, but the rule. &nbsp; We are assembled through desire, accident, chance and mistake. If the future, as Gillies has stated, is in the act of being made from fragments of the past, then it is possible that the present is a shifting state of infinite, dizzying progress and regression. Selfhood, like the Nation or the Landscape or the World, is best navigated when we understand it as a preliminary concept. The image of Witkacy’s Fright has been replaced on my screen by pages of nascent notes, abandoned sentences, rich quotes and endless open tabs. The one has been splintered by the many. Experience, as Gillies’ work in the mirror demonstrates, is clouded by too faithful an account. [*] “Cameron’s oscillation between aspiring to faithfully represent the external look of the subject and the treatment of a model as representation of symbolic form most certainly had an impact on Witkacy, who, like Cameron years earlier, connected the objective value of photography and the imagination of the photographer.” Lynn Warren, Encyclopedia of Twentieth-Century Photography, Routledge; 1 edition (November 15, 2005), 2005, 1695. [†] “... editing expresses the contradiction of a seemingly unstable system that can be perceived as stable and ‘real.' It is not unsurprising that film montage appeared around the time Witkacy was writing in Einstein’s new theories. We accept it as a continuous reality even though it is made of discontinuities, similar to how our experience of reality is created.” John Gillies in Keith Gallasch, “Love, Materialism and Metaphysics”, RealTime, issue #136 Dec-Jan, 2016. [i] &nbsp;Witkacy to Malinowski, in John Gillies, Witkacy &amp; Malinowski as cinematic séance in 23 scenes, (2015 - 2017), 40 min film, 5.1 or stereo sound/installation 300 x 500mm with video projection, 5.1 sound. [ii] Paulina Schlosser, “An Alternative Biography of Witkacy”, http://culture.pl/en/article/an-alternative-biography-of-witkacy, Sep 16, 2013. [iii] Lynne Warren, Encyclopedia of Twentieth-Century Photography, Routledge; 1 edition (November 15, 2005), 2005, 1696. [iv]&nbsp; quoted in Daniel Gerould, ‘Preface’ to Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz, Country House, translated by Daniel Gerould, Taylor &amp; Francis, 1997. [V] John Conomos,“A Video that Questions the Primacy of Narrative”, Strangers in&nbsp;Paradise, National Museum of Contemporary Art,&nbsp;Korea,&nbsp;Seoul, 1992, 34. &nbsp;