The Theatre is Lying: The inaugural Macfarlane Commissions

ANNA BRECKON
born 1984, Auckland
lives and works in Sydney

NAT RANDALL
born 1986, Canberra
lives and works in Sydney

Rear view 2018
high definition digital video, multi-channel sound
85:11 mins
Performers: Linda Chen and Nat Randall
Composer and sound designer: Nina Buchanan
Cinematographer: Ross Turley
Courtesy of the artists

Anna Breckon and Nat Randall have worked collaboratively since 2014, developing a practice situated at the intersection of live performance, video and film. Producing works that are evocative of both the live and the cinematic, they draw on Breckon’s history
of film criticism, filmmaking and film theory, and Randall’s experience with durational models of performance practice.

Following the success of their live performance work The Second Woman 2015 (for which, over the course of a twenty-four-hour period, Randall repeatedly plays out a short scene, with one hundred different men, inspired by John Cassavetes’ 1977 film Opening Night), Rear view continues the artists’ interest in durational or time-based performance, while flirting with the endless representational loop of film and video art. Ostensibly a road movie, with all the clichés of the genre, Rear view depicts two women – performed by Randall with actor and artist Linda Chen – on a road trip from Broken Hill to the town of Wilcannia in country New South Wales. Unlike mainstream cinema, Rear view is presented as a lengthy single take: performed in a studio by the actors in real time – bringing a liveness to the performance that belies its cinematic medium – set against previously recorded, rear-projected footage of the view from the tail end of a vehicle travelling between the two towns.

Rear view’s script is constructed from hundreds of citational excerpts from the history of Australian and Hollywood cinema in which women appear in cars, tightly framed, referencing dialogue, gesture and forms of emotional expression. These cinematic fragments are curated into a continuous form that shifts in mood, tone and genre over ninety minutes. With a set of predetermined rules for selection, Rear view brings together the high, low and middle in such a way that might be best described as anti-discerning, comically reflecting on post-modern taste hierarchies.

SOL CALERO
born in 1982, Caracas
lives and works in Berlin

La puerta 2018
synthetic polymer paint and paper on composition board, plywood, cotton, pine
site-specific installation
Courtesy of the artist, Barbara Gross, Munich and Crèvecoeur, Paris

Reflecting her experience growing up in Venezuela and Spain as part of a Latin diaspora, Sol Calero’s paintings and installations reference the complex social and political histories that inform constructions of Latin identity and aesthetics. Trained as a painter – a medium devoted to creating the illusion of depth within a flat surface – Calero’s work has expanded to embrace the idea of painting as spatial installation, in the creation of three-dimensional staged sets and mise en scène.

Calero’s La puerta is an architectural threshold centred around a highly decorated proscenium arch, a reference to the archways of Spanish colonial architecture that commonly appear in Latin American patios and buildings. The passage from a monochrome environment to one bursting with colour references the historical translation of black and white reproductions of Baroque European paintings by indigenous Latin American artists into their own art-historical genre. As writer Sira Pizà Airas has noted, ‘Calero uses this binary structure in reference to the underlying duality inherent in processes of translation – from black and white to colour, from a model to a reproduction, from the original to the copy, from the self to the other, from empire to colony’.

Ideas of perspective, illusion and trompe l’oeil are central to Calero’s method, along with a high-key chromatic scale and motifs reminiscent of tropicalia, referencing the fusion of European and Latin positions, as much as the stereotypes and clichés inherent in the (mis)representation of Latin identity.

CONSUELO CAVANIGLIA
lives and works in Sydney

present distant 2018
powder coated steel, laminated glass, float glass, two-way mirror, rubber spacers, bolts, castors, lighting
7 panels, each 241.0 x 204.0 x 91.0 cm; installation dimensions variable
Courtesy of the artist, STATION, Melbourne, and Kronenberg Wright Artist Projects, Sydney

Consuelo Cavaniglia cites architecture along with film and photography as key influences for her experiments with the perception and experience of light, colour and space. present distant is an installation of seven sculptural screens which serve both as architectural stage and spatial composition. Sheeted with vitreous surfaces including coloured glass and two-way mirror, Cavaniglia’s screens frame aspects of the gallery, encouraging reflection, refraction and the experience of perception in space.

Theatrical lighting, in the form of follow spots, provides an additional element in the artist’s spatial composition, extending Cavaniglia’s idea of active colour mixing in space. Colours proliferate as one screen is experienced in the field of another, with choreographed lighting sequences – programmed to scan the space and then stop in set configurations – adding further chromatic variation and complexity to the spatial play of light and colour.

If the screens are protagonists, the audience, through active inspection or unintentional reflection, are equally cast as players in the artist’s mise en scène. Cavaniglia’s spatial variations register the appearance of one’s own and others’ bodies in their field, which we experience as the result of chance rather than design.

As a play of illusion, Cavaniglia’s enigmatic compositions revel in the drama between transparency and reflection, the tangible and intangible, appearance and disappearance, the imagined and the actual. As curator and catalogue essayist Annika Kristensen has noted, ‘it is unclear where the artwork begins and ends: with the sculptural forms themselves, or in the shadows that they cast onto the walls and floor, every bit as real as those in Plato’s allegory’.

This project has been assisted by the Australian Government through the Australia Council, its arts funding and advisory body.

MATTHEW GRIFFIN
born 1976, Bendigo, Australia
lives and works in Sydney

The outernet 2018
two channel, high definition digital video
33:34 mins
Courtesy the artist

Matthew Griffin’s takes a humorously existential look at contemporary life, art and culture through social media, installations, performance and video montages, and digital collages of ‘found’, internet sourced, or newly constructed visual material.

Griffin trades in a deliberate blurring of fact and fiction: creating digital collages combining internet memes with references to global politics, popular culture, art world trivia and personal narratives – exploring subjects including deepfake, photoshop, body politics, body manipulation and internet regulation. He looks to the now commonplace use of screens, smartphones, cameras and simple editing software to obscure – if not wilfully destroy – the production and distribution of trustworthy imagery. Irony and humour are employed to examine existential ideas relating to the meaninglessness of human experience, the disconnection of mind and body, and communication breakdown.

Through performance, video and digital display (from lo-fi to the latest high-definition technology), Griffin extends his interest in fictions and falsehoods from the shadowy online world into the bright space of the gallery. In an eclectic mash-up of found footage with staged performance, and real life sound bites with crafted scripts, American politicians rub shoulders with amateur contortionists, talking heads and a musical Goth, traversing subjects from the deep web to dental surgery. Through playful manipulation and irreverent sleight of hand, Griffin’s kaleidoscopic overload of images and ideas reflects the absurd chaos of contemporary life in the Information Age.

DANIEL JENATSCH
born 1985, Sydney
lives and works in Melbourne

The Sheraton Hotel Incident 2018
two channel, high definition digital video, 5.1 surround sound
15:00 mins
Courtesy of the artist

Daniel Jenatsch is an artist and composer with a particular interest in the spaces between documentary and fiction, historiography and invention. His work with sound and music, video and performance has ranged from multi-media documentaries to experimental operas, video and sound installation, film and choreographic scoring.

The Sheraton Hotel Incident is a satirical recreation of an historical event. In 1983, at the then Sheraton Hotel in Spring Street, Melbourne, a group of Australian Secret Intelligence Service (ASIS) agents undertook a training exercise involving the simulated rescue of a hostage from fictional foreign agents. From their base in Room 007, and without the hotel’s knowledge or consent, the agents embarked upon a rescue mission wearing masks and balaclavas, whilst openly wielding firearms. In what became a bungled operation, hotel staff and guests were confronted and alarmed, police were called, several agents arrested, and ASIS – then a little known, top-secret organisation – were thrust embarrassingly and irrevocably into the public spotlight. The incident was subsequently referred to an ongoing Royal Commission, and led to the revocation of ASIS powers, which were not reinstated until 2004, following 9/11 and the Bali Bombing, when security laws were tightened just as human rights protections slackened.

The figure of the spy has long been the subject of literary and cinematic fiction: a character that, by necessity – and not unlike the artist – moves fluidly between the realms of truth and deception. Jenatsch’s two-channel video and sound composition re-enacts historical artefacts – news reports, witness testimonies and tropes from espionage film and music genres – to consider the implications and legacies of the Sheraton Hotel incident. From the simulation of a crisis situation in which an actual crisis was created, Jenatsch reflects upon the implications and legacies of security, intelligence, state apparatus and the law, and the production of real life events in which form follows fiction.