Finland etceteras at Arteles

I am in Finland for an artist residency at the wonderful Arteles (www.arteles.org) and whilst here I am going to be making a video work of some description each day as a form of documentation of my trip.

They will be scraps, vignettes, bits and pieces, unfinished/finished thought bubbles, blah blah blah. Not sure yet. They will mostly be short, about 1 to 2 mins, and done very quickly, whatever flaws or lack of technical expertise included. Those limitations are as valid as proficiency, ie. I don’t care.

The main link is: http://vimeo.com/user10204255

Cold snap, no end in sight from Adam Gibson on Vimeo.

‘Upward Inflection’

This is a work I did that was chosen as a finalist in the 2011 Kudos Gallery Award. It didn’t win but it was nevertheless good to be selected to exhibit.

‘Megalopolis Kiss’

(A work by Adam Gibson and Yi Xing Chen made during the 2010 Shanghai Porosity Studio at Dong Hua University, led by Professor Richar Goodwin and Emma Price from the College of Fine Arts in Sydney.)

Over the past couple of centuries, Shanghai has transformed from a town, to a city, to a “metropolis” and now to its present state of “megalopolis” – a 21^st century super-city the size and scope of which never been seen in history. It is a city of massive construction and development but also one with 20 million people living in its confines.

This project investigates how people connect in such a city and how the search for love that can occur in the face of a near overwhelming cityscape. “Megalopolis Kiss” seeks to articulate the stillness that can occur when two people find each other and how the rest of the city’s chaos can be completely blocked out.

It is the city meeting the individual, it is the human face of the super-city …  it is the megalopolis meeting the kiss.

This work was exhibited in a video installation in a space at the Dong Hua University at the culmination of the 2010 Porosity Studio

The Arid Country

Some photos taken whilst on a Land and Environment trip with COFA in 2009, to the country around Broken Hill in western NSW, including the Menindee Lakes area – which was bone dry at the time due to drought – and the country around Fowlers Gap.

Horizon boxes

These are some works I made at COFA which were exhibited in an exhibition at Kudos Gallery in 2009.

They are made of wood, and rendered with acrylic paint, pulling out from an ordinary photographic snapshot. The intention/idea was to create a work that “captured” the distance of Australia in a very defined space. It was an experiment in creating an object/s which could speak to that distance and yet be something condensed and specific.

I like these works and would consider developing further works along this line in the future.

‘Object Trees’

A drive I did across Australia, from the west coast at Fremantle, WA, to the east coast at Crescent Head, NSW, in June/July 2010 yielded a vast amount of material for my artwork.

This may eventually become a specific overall body of work, but for the moment, I will present elements of that trip as they congeal in my head and in a form of reality.

First cab off the rank is my series of photographs of what I called “Object Trees”, trees where people have placed an incredible array of items on them over God knows how long and for God knows whatever reason. I do have a theory on why this has occurred – to do with a raging against he impotency of the individual when confronted with the vast vast vast landscape and the desire therefore to try to at least make some small mark, some token (yet “knockabout”) scratching on the surface of things – but I will add that later.

In the meantime, some of the images.