[ISEA2013] Artists Statement: Jenny Gillam, Eugene Hansen, John Malcolmson & Daniel Shaw — Future Calls The Dawn Chorus

Artists Statement

An installation juxtaposing a flock of mass-produced contemporary cyber/kitsch bird alarm clocks perching on a wall of graphic design with an audio/video performance and two streaming webcasts. Intended to heighten viewers’ sense of place, awareness of their own sensory perceptions and limitations, and how technology mediates that experience, it deliberately conflates the places that popular culture, the natural world and art occupy in our lives. The work also points to the relationship between the real and virtual experience, whilst the use of live-streamed audio and video is both an ironic reflection on the dysfunctional nature of surveillance in contemporary life, and a pointer to the changes technology is making in our perceptual space.  jennygillam.com   vjrex.info

  • Jenny Gillam holds an MFA from RMIT, Melbourne. Her installation practice, which includes elements of photography, audio, moving image and video mixing performance, engages with aspects of current debate around ecological tensions, ‘place’ as a construct, and nature and its artifice. She has recently begun exhibiting living organisms within the gallery. She develops series of exhibitions, sometimes in a site-specific manner, often produced collaboratively with other artists or with practitioners from other fields.
  • Eugene Hansen has been practicing and exhibiting professionally for over twenty years. He trained as a sculptor in the late eighties and early nineties at Canterbury University, Christchurch, NZ, and gained an MFA through RMIT, Melbourne. His multimedia, often collaborative installations frequently include audio and video performances, and his use of audio and video is as much about the physical properties of the materials as their metaphoric, symbolic or narrative potential.
    Gillam and Hansen collaboratively develop art projects which investigate the socio-politics of ecology within a broader framework of urban neurosis and its manifestations in popular culture.
  • Dr. Kron, a.k.a. John Malcolmson, is an avid consumer of popular culture living and working as a freelance graphic designer in New York. He is a graduate of School of Fine Arts, Christchurch (BFA) and Rhode Island School of Design (MFA), and has collaborated on several art projects, including designing the wall drawings for the previous two iterations of this project.
  • Daniel Shaw holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts from Massey University. He currently works as a web designer to support his art practice, which is predominantly audiovisual performance. He has collaborated with Hansen on several previous projects, including a previous iteration of this work at Dunedin Public Art Gallery, New Zealand.