Phone-videos of monumental works by American minimalist Dan Flavin, refashioned into large-scale filmic ‘captures’ by Australian artist Christian Capurro, feature in SLAVE, part of ACCA’s Important Australian Artists program.
Capurro’s phone-videos were made during a residency at the Sammlung Lenikus, Vienna. An ongoing series, they are part homage, part theft, yet also compelling ‘portraits’ of Flavin’s iconic fluorescent monuments. Capurro re-monumentalizes these works at an architectural scale in ACCA’s own iconic architecture.
SLAVE represents a strain of the new film and image making that plays with some of the conventions that operate in the domains of reproduction, especially how they apply to, and are used in presenting the work of art.
Melbourne based, Capurro works across a range of media including drawing, photography, print, video and installation. His work is process-based and conceptually oriented. He is known for his “erasure projects”, where the pages of glossy magazines were erased over a long periods of time using rubbers or correction-fluid. In Another Misspent Portrait of Etienne de Silhouette (1999-2009), for example, a copy of Vogue Hommes (#92 September 1986) was systematically erased by over 250 people, each noting how long it took and what that labour might have cost calculated on their usual hourly rate of pay.
This project has been assisted by the Australian Government through the Australia Council for the Arts, its funding and advisory body
