Curated by Daniel McOwan, Loop: new Australian video art showcases innovative contemporary video art by five of Australia’s leading artists – Daniel Crooks, Shaun Gladwell, Jess MacNeil, Arlo Mountford and Daniel von Sturmer. In bringing together this group of seemingly diverse artists, Loop is intended to provide a glimpse into some of the fresh methods being employed in video art today. Testing the boundaries of this visual medium, the works in Loop present a spliced meditation on time, space, motion, place and perspective.

The artists showcased in this exhibition all portray a deep interest in, and knowledge of the medium they are using – pushing it to its furthest possible conclusion. Whether it be the intricate kinetic visual experiments at play in Daniel von Sturmer’s installation series Screen Test #1-4; the extension of time in Shaun Gladwell’s eloquent Storm Sequence; or Daniel Crooks’ abstract slices of urban footage wittled down to strands of video resembling DNA structures, in Static No.9(a small section of something larger).

Explorations of the medium of technology itself – through manipulations of its formal elements – have intrigued artists since the first appearance of video art in the 1960’s. However, what differentiates these artists from their predecessors is their reference to the history of art and the moving image.

Arlo Mountford’s The Wanderer Meets the Pioneer, a particularly definitive illustration of self-referentiality, includes a multitude of humorous references to Australian culture. Other examples are more subtle – as in Jess MacNeil’s The Shape of Between. Along with many of the artists in this exhibition MacNeil draws upon her training in the visual arts to replicate the traditional picture plane of a painting.

Combined with a scientific-like fascination with the medium of technology, these inspired works display a poetic and hybrid form of video. These artists have delved beneath the surface, and like all time-based media the works in this exhibition takes time to reveal themselves.

Learning Guides

• Loop: New Australian Video Art Education Resource

Venues