Philip Brophy

Philip Brophy

Vox and Fluorescent

13 October–01 December 200713 Oct–01 Dec 2007

Philip Brophy’s work spans music, cinema, and art and revolves around three centres of enquiry: the body (connecting with horror films), popular culture (manga and anime), and the relation between sound and image (film soundtracks). In the Melbourne artist’s new video installation Vox, there is no dialogue between his male and female animated characters. Instead their exchange is expressed metaphorically, in the graphics and the soundtrack, as an abundance of hysterical symptoms. To quote the script: ‘The sound of her voice is like an opera soprano singing a single high note, yet it contorts into alien, cyborg noise—yet all the while retaining a screaming human quality. As she sings a mutated biosonic-vagina erupts forth from her mouth in a series of lip-like folds that flutter and quiver.’ Brophy describes Vox as ‘a sexualised vocalisation of the popular romantic comedy genre’ and ‘the merger of a dick flick and a chick flick’. Vox is accompanied by an earlier video work Fluorescent (2004), in which ‘Brophy invents himself as a luridly reconstituted being vibrating with Glam’s essential fakeness and plasticity. His performance portrays a transmogrified sexual monster, roaming and strutting a videosonic platform, energised by a pulsating fatsound and seething with a hunger for the bright, the shiny, and the loud.’ A joint project with Gertrude Contemporary Art Spaces, Melbourne; with support from the Besen Family Foundation.