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First Love, 2009
Exhibited in 'Border Crossings'
at Conical Contemporary Art Space
'First Love', Grantpirrie, Sydney
This project has been supported by Arts Victoria
Above: First Love, 2009
Evelyn Krape
reads the short story, Contract with witches
Border Crossings (recent video works)
Conical Contemporary Art Space 2009
Border crossings presented recent video work from 2008–2009. It surveyed two major bodies of work created over the last two years, First Love and Bordertown. The role of performance in these projects is highlighted by the theatrical intervention in the gallery space, as the videos are offered as stand alone works.
'First Love', Grantpirrie, Sydney
2009
First Love exemplifies the unhinging of time and desire in contemporary life through the image and material form of melting ice . The work aligns ice with desire under capitalism in several interlocking parts: as an installation of four large-scale glow-in-the-dark paintings, a selection of films from the First Love series, and with 13 small paintings of ice on mirror. Finally, in an extraordinary representation of the inextricable relationship between ice and time, a theatre light will slowly melt through a large block of ice.
First Love points to the breakdown of the human order of time as the embodiment and mirror image of the problem of desire under capitalism. Global timekeeping demands that we structure temporality in a linear fashion using atomic clocks to mimic cosmic time. But a gap exists between the hours kept on our clocks and universal time, which is ever-changing and always expanding with the cosmos.
This schism is called Delta Time and it is exponentially increasing because of tidal braking, or the gravitational pull of the moon. This is widely known and accounted for by leap seconds, yet melting polar masses are anticipated to be further slowing the speed of the earth's rotation because of the shifting dispersion of water. While this work demonstrates how time and the capitalist machine are unhinging, the point maintained is that this is not disastrous, as cognisance of the dysfunction of the patriarchal and capitalist order is the only means of freedom from its rule. First Love is a work of hope, pointing to a harmonious human relationship with existence as liberated desiring organisms. In this sense, Delta Time can be seen as an opportunity rather than a catastrophe.
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