Phone-videos capturing monumental works by American minimalist Dan Flavin, refashioned into large-scale filmic ‘captures’ by Australian artist Christian Capurro, feature in the upcoming exhibition SLAVE at the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art (ACCA) from 16 August.
Presented as part of ACCA’s Influential Australian Artists program, Capurro’s phone-videos were made during a residency at Maumaus, Escola de Artes Visuals, Lisbon. 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 it that labour might have cost calculated on their usual hourly rate of pay.
SLAVE will be accompanied by the survey exhibition Optical Mix, which brings together a series of works that uselight, kinetics and visual oscillations.
Works that play on perception and visuality are brought together in this international survey exhibition include, On Color/Multi#3 (1991) by Joseph Kosuth, Martin Creed’s Work No: 312, A lamp going on and off (2003), and Ugo Rondinone’s colour target painting ZWEIUNDZWANZIGSTERMAERZZWEITAVSENDUNDEI, 2001.
A new commission by Melbourne artists Cake Industries (Jesse Stevens & Dean Petersen) will be a central feature. Two large-scale light pillars in ACCA’s Gallery 3, will expose the beauty and intricate nature of the individual ‘pixel’, drawing on our culture’s now co-dependent relationship with the screen.
Optical Mix also features works by Daniel von Sturmer, Ken Jacobs, Stanislaus Ostoja-Kotowski, Nike Savvas, Bridget Riley, Ugo Rondinone and more.
Christian Capurro: SLAVE and Optical Mix Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, 111 Sturt St, Southbank Exhibition: 16 August – 28 September 2014 Free entry For more information, visit: www.accaonline.org.au for details.
Image: Christian Capurro, IS, 2013 (detail). Sammlung Lenikus, Vienna three-channel digital video installation exhibition views. Courtesy of the artist and Milani Gallery.