Exhibitions

This exhibition juxtaposes two artists exploring digital imaging.

Melbourne’s Daniel Crooks is known for his 'time slice' videos, which draw on the precedents of cubism and the chronophotography of Etienne-Jules Marey and Eadweard Muybridge. Crooks computer processes original video footage so that each frame contains areas from the original shot, but from different moments in time. The effect is to spatialise time and to temporalise space. Sometimes Crooks so distorts and abstracts his subjects that they become unrecognisable; other times the effect is subtle, suggesting an uncanny bulge in an otherwise familiar scene.

At art school, New Zealand artist Jae Hoon Lee began using a flatbed scanner to record changes in his skin. He documented sores, pores, freckles and hairs in gross detail, pressed up against the glass, then collaged the scans to create sheets of skin, deranged diaristic bodyscapes, which he presented as photographs and videos. He has gone on to create other works exploring the relationship between the perspectiveless gaze of the scanner and computer image processing and our conventional expectations of photography. [image: Daniel Crooks]

Yoga… do you go for exercise, for relaxation, for spiritual guidance or because there are a bunch of hot singles and a sexy instructor? – Grant Stevens

Grant Stevens is known for his pithy text-videos exploring vernacular and mass media truisms and recalling advertising, movie trailers and relaxation videos. Stevens trades in cliches, platitudes and stock phrases but points to their richness, probing the overlap between mass media fictions and everyday reality. While some of his works play on language's slipperiness, others emphasise its hyper-lucidity. Against the backdrop of modern life's impossibly hyperactive schedules, his new works go fishing for personal reflection, self-expression, self-help, new age spirituality and other ways to get a grip. The former Brisbanite, now based in Los Angeles, has returned to make a new show for the IMA. Here he presents a video text-mandala and a freestanding wall covered in a waterfall wallpaper-mural with an inset sound system.

John Lennon championed him, Dennis Hopper used him and Marilyn Manson loves him. — Ben Cobb

For this year’s IMA@DENDY we present the cult classic underground films of Chilean-born director Alejandro Jodorowsky. Visually stunning, deeply disorienting, often incomprehensible, these films blend religious imagery, esoteric mysticism, freaks and amputees, eroticism, surrealism and ultra-violence. With their genre-bending, their fusion of mystic geometry and anarchy, and starring the director himself, these grail-questing epics offer a surprising precedent for Matthew Barney’s The Cremaster Cycle.
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El Topo (1970) is a trippy surrealistic Western. Classic Americana and avant-garde European cinema sensibilities meet Zen Buddhism and the Bible as Jodorowsky as El Topo, a master gunman and cosmic mystic, defeats four sharp-shooting rivals on a bizarre path to enlightenment and surreal resurrection. R18+

In The Holy Mountain (1973) a Christ-like thief wanders through grotesque scenarios filled with religious and sacrilegious imagery. He meets a Jodorowsky, a mystic guide and alchemist, who introduces him to seven wealthy and powerful individuals, each representing a planet in the solar system: a cosmetics manufacturer, an arms manufacturer, an art dealer, a political financial adviser, a toy maker, a police chief and an architect. Along with the thief and the guide, they divest themselves of their worldly goods and seek out the Holy Mountain, in order to displace the gods who live there and become immortal. R18+

Take the opportunity to see these incredibly strange and rarely screened films. El Topo introduced by artist and film critic Philip Brophy, Saturday 14 June at 6pm; The Holy Mountain, Sunday 15 June at 3pm; The Holy Mountain introduced by Trash Video’s Andrew Leavold; Saturday 21 June at 6pm; El Topo Sunday 22 June at 3pm. Screenings at Dendy Cinemas, 346 George Street, Brisbane. Tickets ph: 3211 3244. Films distributed by Siren Visual. [image: The Holy Mountain]

A selection of work from our touring car-in-art show, toured with support from Visions Australia and the Gordon Darling Foundation. Sadie Chandler, Martin Mischkulnig, Ben Morieson, Louise Paramor, Patricia Piccinini, Scott Redford and Daniel Wallwork.

The cliches of everyday romantic discourse are as profound as they are silly. This exhibition explores the habits, language and practices of dating — the rules of romantic engagement. Mutlu Cerkez paints gouaches of messages women left on his answerphone in response to his dating profile. Robin Hely secretly video-records a date organized through a phone service, collecting solo mother Sherrie’s life story, then putting the moves on her. In Grant Stevens’ video restages a generic love letter, scattering its words in a stary stary night. Photographer Darren Sylvester shows a young woman in a face-pack, hanging on the telephone. David Rosetzky’s video features voiceovers — interior monologues — reflecting on the dynamics of relationships, desires, encounters and breakups. With her Relationship Contracts, Gabrielle de Vietri takes the necessity of consent too far, imagining that even the parties in a stalker/victim relationship might be compelled to sign off on it. Love is a battlefield. [image: Darren Sylvester]

Rose Nolan traffics in forms, codes and ideals founded in utopian strands of 20th Century avant-gardism. At the core of her project lies a fascination with Russian Constructivism and Suprematism, inflected with the language games of conceptual art. Ranging from artist books and multiples through to carpet works and large-scale wall paintings, Nolan brushes the heroic gestures of utopian modernism with the intimacies and foibles of the personal. The show will include wall paintings, floor pieces, banners, and installations that build across and around the architecture of the gallery. A joint project with Artspace, Sydney.