Exhibitions
Brisbane Airport Fresh Cut 2009
Robert Leonard
For Aaron Burton, the personal and the political are intertwined. Beginning as a photojournalist, Burton enjoyed the still camera as 'a passport into other people's lives'. In recent years, he has specialised in combining still and moving images into distinctive short videos that explore personal experiences and social issues. His subjects are diverse: a Gold Coast man prosecuted for getting about in a pink bikini; cancer patients in the Wesley Hospital; a Gold Coast veterinarian; a righteous, indignant Indigenous man; and wasted party kids. Curiosity has turned Burton into a frequent flyer; documenting Queensland students on a South African 'social-justice camp' and bearing witness to the reconstruction in Sri Lanka following the tsunami. In Fresh Cut, he will be showing Protest Days, a chronicle of a year's political protests, and Gran and Me, recording a ritualistic cup-of-tea ceremony. Fresh Cut also sees the premiere of Burton's Amazon Guard, a photographic essay on video that resulted from a month spent in the city of Macapa, Brazil, with his NSW park-ranger sister, Tegan. Amazon Guard probes issues that surround conserving the Amazon forest.
A pop-culture vulture, Sarah Byrne reworks and reorchestrates samples of found movie footage to create multi-channel video installations. Her ten-screen video piece Us VS We: MollyOhMe deconstructs and perversely reconstructs Claire Standish, Molly Ringwald's character in The Breakfast Club. Two clusters of screens show Claire at breaking point, after being taunted about her home life by John Bender (Judd Nelson). But Byrne has edited Bender out and so redirects the conversation; she turns Claire's aggressive reactions to him back onto Claire herself. Solopsistic, Byrne's Claires bicker and banter back and forth, without resolve, as tormented becomes tormentor. Byrne says her interest in making the piece lies less in Ringwald's retro appeal than in the cacophonous soundscape generated by ten soundtracks running simultaneously, out of synch.
Genre-bender Tim Kerr is a master of the spoof. His video works play fast and loose with the codes and conventions of TV shows and movies. Where Douglas Gordon offered the ponderous 24 Hour Psycho, Kerr gives us a hysterical, condensed, twenty-four-minute version for art lovers with attention-deficit disorders. Here, Anthony Perkins and Janet Leigh chatter like chipmunks. Kerr rescores an ultraviolent Hollywood fight sequence, turning it into comedy, and edits romantic dialogue to alternating images of a potato and a peeled banana. His two-channel video work for Fresh Cut draws on the horror-film genre, riffing on its classic suspense-inducing devices. Playing on our heartstrings, Kerr taunts us with the prospect that the kitty-cat might get it.
Using social life as her subject and medium, Hiromi Tango puts her own spin on relational aesthetics. She temporarily occupies social spaces, such as shop windows, with her self and her stuff. From her intricate, cluttered, near-psychedelic sets, she engages with visitors and passers-by, swapping notes, exchanging gifts, and even having them sleep over. Tango's art of conversation and exchange scrambles distinctions between public and private space, and between artist and audience. For Fresh Cut Tango will park a caravan, the current incarnation of her 'Hiromi Hotel', in the gallery. It will be filled with fetishistic objects produced by her and collected from others. People who have participated in her previous projects will also contribute to this one. As well as being on-site to engage with visitors, Tango invites everyone to pitch their tent alongside her caravan.
[image: Sarah Byrne]