Flathead (Origin of the Specious)

A three channel video work that was produced under the psuedonym Eve Roleston that explored the arbitrary nature of signification as it played across a range of images, texts and sounds. The work aimed to provide a considered engagement with the contingent, polymorphous and unstable qualities of the material on each of the three screens. This work forms part of my practice-led research undertaken for my PhD. It deals with reconsidering the relationship between politics and aesthetics by employing strategies of humour, play theory and the fictocritical

Your Loss is Our Gain

2 x 2.5 metre text based wall painting with a hidden automatic air freshener timed to spray every 60 seconds. The work formed part of a group exhibition that dealt with Humour,Politics and Art. It was part of a series of ongoing works made under the pseudonym Eve Roleston. Roleston is part of a trio of pseudonyms I use, the others being Ernesto Love, and Ernest Olove, to explore the research potential of the fictocritical in a visual arts practice.This forms part of an ongoing body of practice-led research undertaken in my PhD dealing with reconfiguring the relationship between art and politics.

World peace for video art

A single channel video projection with image, text and sound components. It was projected so as entirely fill a 3 x 3.5 wall in a 6 x 3.5 metre gallery space. The work deals with the role of humour and the fictocritical in exploring the relationship between politics and art.

Mark Webb Survey Exhibition

The exhibiton brought together a diverse group of works using an array of presentational strategies, which critically facilitate a dialogue across the material and conceptual aspects of my practice over 25 years. It focussed on my ongoing explorations into art as a model for research, as a site for intermediary exchange between different discursive forms and as a space to engage the politics of the everyday.

Figure and ground

Critically responding to Heimo Zobernig's painted green carpet, a semi-permanent architectural intervention realised in the immediate aftermath of my survey show, I painted the windows of the predominantly glazed space red to effectively create a two-colour painting that envelops the viewer and adds a new dimension to the painterly tradition of hinterglasmalerei. The work created an immersive environment for viewers that aimed to promote an affectual experience through the intense saturation of the complimentary contrasts red and green.

EDDY

This exhibiton bought together a selection of artists - Danielle Clej, Channon Goodwin, Christopher Handran, Majena Mafe, Erika Scott and Mark Webb - to explore the role conversations and incidental engagements play as part of making art.The premise of the show focused on how these artists might respond to the process of sharing ideas and responses to one other in the making of artwork.

Just dawn

Commissioned for the It’s Timely exhibition at the Blacktown Arts Centre, Just Dawn is a response to two speeches that former Australian Prime Minister Gough Whitlam delivered in Blacktown in 1972 and 1974. Throughout the video, a series of white words and phrases fade in and out as a virtual camera flies towards an abstract horizon line. The narrative thread of the text is directed towards an unnamed Whitlam through the repeated appearance of the words ‘you said’. As the video progresses, the colours of the animated background slowly brighten to resemble an emerging dawn, and the sound, text and camera movements build in frequency and intensity. As they do so, the once optimistic outlook becomes increasingly unsteady. In these ways, Just Dawn is equal parts homage and lament for the ideological acuity and ambition of Whitlam’s agenda. It explores how Whitlam’s words can become markers for the complexities of both his own specific transformative policies, and the character of the socially progressive movement more broadly.

Haven

In Haven, a female voice guides a meditation while an abstract animated form progressively morphs from geometric to irregular on screen. As the video develops, the tone shifts from relaxation to seduction and, eventually, to hints of mild contempt. Through its subtle shifts in tone and form, the work plays with the relationships between self-help, self-absorption and self-pity. Its verbal and visual references gently suggest a disjunction between internalised thoughts and external realities. In doing so, it also alludes to the ways that desire and doubt can inform quests for inner peace.

Thoughts make the world

Thoughts Make the World is a synchronised two-channel video with sound. On the right-hand screen, a young man and woman exchange timeworn philosophical phrases and existential questions. On the left-hand screen, a guitarist plays a soundtrack that slowly builds over time. As the actors’ quest for meaning struggles toward an unresolved end, the guitarist launches into a climactic, liberating solo, eclipsing their somewhat-labored attempts to understand existence. By contrasting these verbal and non-verbal signifiers of self-reflection and self-expression, Thoughts Make the World questions how and where to grapple with enduring existential problems in a context dominated by the pre-packaged formats of popular culture and ironic modes of individualised response.

Qaphqa : fresh cut 2013 Part 1

'Qaphqa' was an outdoor artwork exhibited in the forecourt of Brisbane’s Institute of Modern Art as part of Fresh Cut exhibition series. The work took the form of a three-storey-high series of stacked 'outhouses', the seat of each opening onto the cubicle below to form what the artist referred to as a 'long drop'. Assembled in untreated pine and plywood and festooned with mock-medieval ensigns and flags, the work included a flyer containing a poem by Jorge Luis Borges and was accompanied by a published catalogue.

Actor 1 (Icecream Coles Polygon)

A sculpture made of polyurethane, epoxy resin, pigment and lacquer depicting a ice-cream melting into the form of a nine sided geometric figure.

Regards, the Pit

A solo exhibition by Joseph Breikers included in the MetroArts 2011 galleries Program. The exhbition comprised a series of predominantly sculptural works that reflected the artists ongoing interest in medieval, gothic and death metal visual motifs. The exhibition thus acted as a ironic meditation on ritual, belonging and cultural identity.

Future perfect

"Future Perfect" is a solo artist exhibition featuring a 9 channel video installation, which is comprised of looped computer animation projections. In the first room, the big one, there are nine projections of looped computer animations. Many of these look like representations of gallery spaces containing sculptures, including rotating interpenetrating discs, bouncing coloured coffins, and jostling cardboard cubes (the cubes are blank, then covered in drawings, then covered in photographic imagery). In one video, a man and a woman walk towards one another but never get together. In the second room, an animated video on a flatscreen suggests an origin story. The subtitles tell how, in Russia, my great-grandfather made a joke about Stalin's child bride that cost him his life. That one isn’t a loop; it has a beginning, middle, and end. Lying on the floor, in front of the video, are two slightly crumpled mural prints of photographs of the ocean. There's also a clear Perspex cloud shape on a wall. Viewers will see themselves reflected in it, as if it were a distant hovering mirage. The first room of the exhibition, where objects are set in perpetual motion, is about departure. The second room registers some sense of arrival. The future perfect implies looking back on something that hasn't happened yet; future and past are conflated and the present is somehow deferred. The future perfect combines anticipation and reflection, and it relates to my interest in combining 3-D animation with other mediums like drawing, painting, and shot video. In my work, the virtual and actual coexist in tension, just like experience and expectation in the future perfect.

Aggregate Icons/Combat Drag

A series of large-scale photographic collages and videoworks installed in the 2010 The Beauty Of Distance: Songs of Survival in a Precarious Age, Sydney Biennale Cockatoo Island, Sydney (cat.)The work addresses her ongoing interest in feminist strategies for negotiating individual and collective identities, equality,and social activism.

Effacing power

A solo exhibiton of painting, photography, collage and fabric sculpture works that continues Wyman's interest in exploring feminist strategies for negotiating individual and collective identities,equallity and social activism. She explores the idea that the clothed body is often the first point of protest and demonstrates how masks and disguises provide collective power and protection in conflict zones.