Vincent Ward Exhibition

Saw the Vincent Ward exhibition at the Gus Fisher Gallery with the class. There were three rooms of his work. They're all screen installations that are projected on semi-coarse cloth and the ceiling.

I'll call it the small room, foyer, and big room.

In the small room there are four cloth screens in a box formation so it feels like a nice enclosed space leaving the corners open for people to walk in. I saw three different video sequences being projected on these cloths. The first one was of a horse and a fat man in the foreground. The fat man appears to be struggling to get up while the horse curiously and cautiously walks over to the man. In this sequence I liked the suspense of waiting for something to happen and I really like the blues of the film that contrast with the yellow of the streetlight. However, that didn't really make me feel anything in terms of an installation. I thought of that more as a film that's merely projected on some cloth.

The next two sequences that played, I felt, were more successful as screen installations. The first of these two was of a dove in flight. It flies in and out of the light and as it disappears from view it would reappear on another screen. It's hard to follow it around and it feels like the dove literally flew to a different screen. It worked with the audio coming from different directions to achieve this particular effect of the dove flying to different screens.


The next one was also with a bird, so it was similar. I thought it was less successful though because the film wasn't very smooth and the background had bright, saturated colours. I think this takes away the flow and makes it seem really disconnected.



To be completely honest I didn't really enjoy the one he did in the foyer. It didn't inspire or capture my imagination in any way. I think it may be because this one was made with more stills than moving images. In fact, it was so weak it didn't make much of an impression on me. Therefore I don't even remember whether or not it had any moving images in it at all. The only thing I liked about it was how it was projected on the ceiling and it was in the middle of a circle. In this sense, the placement of the projection was really beautiful. People don't look up very often and I find it more interesting when things are on the ceiling because you don't really notice them that much.

In the big room there were multiple projections on multiple cloth screens. It was of women underwater in plastic bags with live fish inside.


The symbolism in it was quite obvious I think. You could say that the plastic bag and the lady is like a foetus in an amniotic sack while the surrounding water is amniotic fluid, or maybe primordial abyss. It also makes me think of how you leave your new fish in a plastic bag for a while in your fish tank so that they acclimatise to the new environment.

The multiple screens and the way the projections' lights can still be seen through the other side, but diffused by the cloth, is interesting. It reminds me of how the light looks in the ocean. Maybe the cloth is like kelp in the ocean. I don't know if the spill of a projection on to another screen is intentional, if yes I can see that the artist is trying to make it feel like that ocean. I imagine that's how the ocean's light is like, always shimmering and moving, but diffused by the water. The audio reinforces the feeling of being in the ocean, but I agree with James that the random piano music is really out of place.

Some people thought too much was going on all at once in terms of projections, heaps of screens and audio combined. Personally, I thought it was quite atmospheric and portrays the ocean really well. I went snorkeling one time, so I didn't get to go very deep as I'm not very confident swimming in the ocean. The water was full and cloudy with non-venomous jellyfish, small salps, eel larvae, and little shrimp things that light up green and blue. Deeper beneath were beautiful fishes and farther were a few stingrays gliding along the bottom. In the ocean, a lot goes on even in that small piece of ocean I went to and it does get chaotic. So I thought it showed that chaotic feel of the ocean quite well. The ocean always looks like it's alive. You won't find the ocean looking as smooth as glass; it always moves and ripples.