Panel Statement
Chair Persons: Lisa Anderson & Josephine Starrs
Presenters: Leon Cmielewski & Joni Taylor
This panel explores multi-dimensional works that interact and explore the narratives of damaged landscapes -urban and outback scars found on and within the structures of land and architecture and scars related to the movement of peoples. The speakers will present their artworks developed from the evidence of weather shifts that are woven through various forms, including personal documentary-style images, GPS data and satellite imagery. These artworks use images of the earth’s surface to explore narratives of potential futures. Within past and present actions can be found a future that revels within the sense of belonging. The future could be based within a continuing paradigm or shift into greater understandings of new and ancient technologies that shift our potential for creating and investing in a future visible world. The projected images and context expand the premise that tapping into the narrative of place reveals an understanding of a future plan. This element begins to question and push the science of weather, the land and the movement of peoples to a frisson, wherein may lie a new approach. Dr. Lisa Anderson, Josephine Starrs and Leon Cmielewski have all worked with Lake Mungo in the remote Australian outback and have drawn together some of these quests to look more closely at the implications of story in place. Dr. Anderson and Joni Taylor have both explored the elements of collision of the urban landscape against a wilder life, that takes the city back at any opportunity. Dr. Anderson created Night Snow which explores the shifts of animals into the villages within the High Arctic and compares these stories to those of drought affected cities in Australia. Joni Taylor considers a shift in our architectural relationship to the wild to develop an academic understanding and smart world approach to the concept of architecture, to create an architecture that encompasses the changes in weather and movements of populations, in order to establish aware city surfaces and enclosures. The panel will explore a range of factors to feed into an understanding of a future that is a brave new world architecture, that protects from the void, that inserts into this a possibility for a genuine story of place to guide/inform projects. The spectatorship understanding of past engagements includes the notions of national parks and wild life as outsider events and a pioneering approach to architecture. The speakers seek to integrate narratives of land, architecture and urban movements to focus on the problems posed by the culture/nature divide. The future is inherent within this form of visual understanding and draws on the very different elements that concern these artists. They explore the social agenda of difference, imbedded within the question asked by the landscape works of the Qing Dynasty – Am I in Nature or is Nature in Me?
- Dr. Lisa Anderson is and artist with an international practice working across media and collaborating with others to create performative events and projection and sound works. These installations have been shown at venues including the St. Tropez Film Festival, the Cite Internationale Des Arts in Paris, Wagga Wagga Regional Gallery, Artscape in Australia, SXS in Denmark and also elements have been exhibited in Beijing, Amsterdam and London. They include IVU, a Perspex sculpture and multichannel video installation, The Truth About Snodomes, a paper work and single screen and sound work, and Precious, a large scale light and sound work located in beachside sand dunes. These works form part of the shinyshinycloud projects that explore the beauty of the apocalypse due to weather and people/animal movements, in places such as the High Arctic, Central Java, the Scottish Highlands, the Australian outback and various city locations such as Paris, Beijing and London. Dr. Anderson’s doctoral submission entitled, Memory Salvage and Invention: the Collision and Collusion of Public Archive and Personal Anecdote in Public Art was the first study to place the experience of the artist as core to the creation of commissioned public art, with a brief that explores community. Specifically she was the first artist in residence at the Australian Museum and to create a War Memorial work for a community. Dr. Anderson was recently Visiting Scholar and is the Innovation Fellow in Architecture at the University of Technology, Sydney and has previously undertaken Fellow research projects with the University of Wollongong Creative Arts, Australia lisaanderson.com
- Josephine Starrs is a Senior Lecturer and Chair of Film & Digital Art at Sydney College of the Arts, University of Sydney, Australia.
Full text (PDF) p. 93-98 (by Lisa Anderson)