Artist's statement:
Nocturne is an installation of variable dimensions. Professionally produced
illuminated signs, similar to those used to advertise fantastical meals
in noodle bars, are mounted in front of a continuous open light-box. This
creates a seemingly 360 degree cityscape as seen by night. The image has
been composed from around 500 images of cities by night, down-loaded from
the Internet. These represent a mixture of tourist snaps, the efforts of
amateur photographers and municipally commissioned publicity shots. The
images have been unified by enhancing the colour to preternatural levels
- again suggesting the garish quality of cityscape signage - and then setting
all against the flat black background of night. The resulting image is reminiscent
of the backdrop to news readers and political commentators; or the classic
aerial shots used as the scene-setting device at the beginning of a film...
... ,The evolution
of language through common usage is perhaps the best guide we have to
the development of contemporary culture. My intention with Nocturne was
to use the bewilderment and fascination of the émigré coming to turns
with a new signifying system as a mechanism for considering that system:
an attempt to document for example the nauseous experience at the end
of a long flight of the familiar and the exotic being thrown together
in the crude cocktail of jetlag - the result of 20 hours spent looking
out of the window of a plane; the night expanding in slow-motion; familiar
and then alien cities appearing below, made equal, de-politicised from
the accelerated viewpoint. To observe the perceptual experience of place
stretched to breaking point, as time zones melt away and attention waxes
and wanes; sometimes spending longer looking at a fabled city, sometimes
seeing nothing but abstract constellations of dispersed lights in brief
hallucinogenic moments between sleep. Kit Wise Melbourne, May 2003
|
