Flow (2008)

Flow, a multi-layered video, is projected down from the ceiling onto a white screen on the floor so that viewers’ spatial experience is integral to the work. We circulate around the piece, viewing it from all sides as one would walk around the edges of a large puddle of water, looking into its depths. Upside-down neighbourhood reflections were shot with the camera sometimes oriented upright and sometimes on its side. The resulting footage dislocates the familiar, with colours, shapes and movement taking on a visual role independent from the content portrayed. This footage was digitally merged with fifty-year-old colour home movies, often rotated upside-down or sideways, like the snapshots in the Reflection images. The resulting video work is a continually changing kaleidoscope of time and place, abstraction and representation, reality and memory. The soundscape is layered, sometimes evoking what is occurring visually, sometimes interweaving an additional narrative that is heard but not seen: the voice of a doctor dictates a report that describes the state of dementia and disorientation of a very elderly man, suggesting possible connections between the patient and the imagery of the old movies. The video is 4 minutes long, and loops continuously.

The Flow projection can be installed with the images from the Reflection series presented as backlit transparencies in light boxes. The images combine upside-down reflections of houses, trees and streets in neighbourhood puddles, with decades-old colour snapshots, glimpsed like fragments of memory through the contemporary street images. They echo the many dualities at play in the video – surface and depth, past and present, reality and abstraction – and propose a space of introspection and reflection on our individual place within a temporal and spatial continuum. Exhibited together, both still and moving media emanate light in an otherwise dark space to dramatic effect.