Through her intricate video installations Brisbane-based artist Victoria Wareham merges analog and digital technologies to envision future screen-based ecologies.
Inspired by cinema’s language and tropes, her work offers a captivating post-humanist vision of art and technology.
TELL US A LITTLE BIT ABOUT THE EXHIBITION…
Victoria Wareham (VW): Contact Zone is an exhibition of new and recent work that explores the ontology of the screen by understanding it as an invisible, autonomous membrane that exists between image, object and viewer.
By creating a complex structure of narratives across the (gallery spaces) at Metro Arts, this exhibition will posit a new interpretation of the screen by imagining it as an unstable, vitalist entity and transformative agent.
HOW WOULD YOU DESCRIBE YOURSELF AS AN ARTIST?
VW: Working with the moving image in physical space, my practice addresses theoretical concerns relating to the ontological stability of the screen as defined by its relationship to the viewer and the screen-based image.
By taking a vitalist approach that understands screens as temporal living entities susceptible to the mortal conditions of injury, ageing and extinction, I bring together analogue and digital technologies to create highly confected physical and virtual ecosystems that consider future screens as an autonomous mutable species.
With a background in sculpture and video production, my work moves between two- and three-dimensional space to facilitate a radical, post-humanist vision of future screen-based ecologies.
WHO INSPIRES YOU AND WHY?
VW: The work that I produce is inspired by the material of film and the language and experience of cinema.
Borrowing visual tropes from the cyberpunk and tech-horror cinema genres, the installations that I synthesise combine radiant moving image works with technological detritus from the past and chemically grown forms to imagine future screens as organic metapictures.
HOW DID YOU DISCOVER YOUR LOVE FOR VISUAL ARTS?
VW: From a young age, visual arts has always resonated with the ways that I intuitively choose to engage with and interpret the world around me.
Visits to the cinema were always exciting experiences, and from the first time that I witnessed a moving image installation in a gallery space, I knew that was the style of communication I wanted to learn more about and gradually develop into my own form of art making.
Don’t miss Contact Zone in the Metro Arts Galleries 7 DEC ‘24 – 25 JAN ‘25, West Village, West End.
Click here to find out more.
