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Call Signs #8 is part of the survey exhibition '2004' at the Ian Potter Gallery, National Gallery of Victoria. It is an interactive work using two theremins pinned at opposite ends of a landscape painting of mountains. The theremins are unstable and make a high-pitched rising and falling sound which can range from a 'windy mountain' noise to screams. The objects respond to touch and body proximity.
The long, horozontal format continues the experiment with narrative painting taken from Chinese landscape painting which started with Call Signs #6.
Another narrative source used in this work is the tourist map, common in the 1960's of my childhood, in which the map of Australia is represented as a cluster of destinations, natural (which includes aboriginal people), agricultural and industrial. Looking at this map now, it still feels impossibly exotic and fills me with an intense urge to visit all these places in sequence, from the Melbourne gas works to the Witenoom asbestos mine. This work is a response to my experience of the Australian imaginary landscape.
The relationship of Australians to the landscape is an important theme in Australian art history and non-indigenous Australians feel a strong impulse to legitimise our presence by claiming a spiritual relationship to the land. Yet our relationship is characterised by a denial of our connection to the land - the land of our ancestors. Our imaginary landscapes are occupied by the flowers, fruit and vegetables of Britain, Europe and Asia. Our gardens are filled with roses and irises, olives and grapevines, chillies and corriander, not bushland.
This landscape draws on the paintings of Albert Namatjira, an aboriginal view of the Australian landscape, through the European medium of landscape painting. Into this panorama the objects fly, birch trees and lochs, composed of domestic rubbish and cast-offs, like small deities, new occupying destinations in the 'empty' landscape. |
