sound – RM Moving Image Archive

Natalie Tozer

Title: Footpath Fossil (breathe)
Year: 2020
Length: 20:26
Format: Looped H265 10bit,
Credits: Director: Natalie Tozer
Director of Photography & Editor: Sam Tozer
Original Soundtrack: Paul Rhodes

My work documents exposed urban stratigraphy. I look for layers that aren’t meant to be seen. Curbside ruins. Crumbled footpaths. Potholes. These layers are visible histories of life/nonlife entangled within the ground. I interpret these small moments in our urban landscape as interruptions to capitalist strategies. Mythically and metaphorically rich, the ground provides us with clues, knowledge, refuge as well as the sunken networks of extraction, exploitation and disposal. The ground is active, generous and vulnerable. We lace it with tar seal, concrete and gravel; stone blasted and rendered for our urban environments. I see my practice as a way to read and understand the ground as the surface to a complex underland . By collecting, documenting and deciphering the findings, I hope to gather enough data to learn something. I like to reach out in the dark, to gaze into a possible future and let the practice reveal the rest.

This year, I have filmed broken footpaths near and around Karangahape Rd, Tāmaki Makaurau. The markings from tools and previous layers of broken grout lie exposed for interpretation like messages from the underland lurching upwards eager to be seen.The recent COVID19 rahui brought repair and construction of the footpath to a halt. During this lull in productivity and progress I captured footage which now acts as a fossil record. I want to show through the work that I deeply admire the well- used areas we travel through. I want to acknowledge and contemplate the beauty of its worn complexity and explore the idea that meaningful production should be a subset of ‘care’. This approach is about revealing the alternative strategies against capitalist modes of production, where we focus on tending and caring for what we have, instead of perpetuating in an ever-expanding frenzy.

The rahui gave me and my nine-year-old daughter Penelope time to walk around our neighborhood, where she carefully acted as a pathfinder and navigational keeper of our mutual discovery. Together, we found and surveyed small poetic moments of urban decay, some of which will never be fixed, remaining arrested in time just the way they are. These places are entanglements where the underground reaches through the ever-expanding mask of concrete, the mark of empire building since the Roman times. For me, these walks enact soft lines of experience and memory, weaving relational becomings in common worlds. They are perspectives on Life and Nonlife, and the offer of coexistence. Through exploring and striving to understand I try to invite the possibility of symbiotic and improbable collaborations into my practice and relationships.

Perhaps in years to come, this geontological learning and speculation will emerge into the next generation through Penelope. I smile when she unearths small findings from the curb, lichen encrusted tar seal crumbles. Like finding a perfect shell on a storm swept beach, she collects and clutches her find all the way home to show me. A small offering from the messy entangled ground.

Thematic tags: Documentary, capitalism, environment/ecology, abstraction, sound, family

Title: Soothsayer
Year: 2018
Length: 03:50
Format: 4K looped video
Credits: Director: Natalie Tozer, Director of Photography & Editor: Sam Tozer

The gentle, calming nature of this work establishes a contrast with the severity of social and environmental realities today. A meditative kaleidoscopic loop of destruction aims to scale potential future outcomes into a series of digestible alternative offerings. This video work slowly crushes folded paper ‘fortune tellers’; cootie catchers, chatterboxes, whirlybirds or paku-paku. Hand folded paper objects used by children, manipulating folds to predict the future based on decisions made by the one seeking their fortune. The self destructing geometric paper structures talk to the ephemeral nature of all human construction. The child places faith in a paper object and constructs a hopeful and naive vision of the future; as humanity has, for so long, assumed its continued good fortune and permanence on earth. The work aims to pitch alternative narratives through image worlds and seeks out some of the deepest possibilities and consequences of human construction and destruction.

Thematic tags: Environment/ecology, abstraction, geological time, deep time, future fossils

Nat Tozer is an artist and experimental film maker based in Tāmaki Makaurau, working with paper, sculpture and video. Recent shows include Emerging Artists Show, Sanderson Gallery and Salted Earth, Sosage Gallery. Her work has been selected for Guangzhou Art Fair, Femisphere Zine, Headland Sculpture on the Gulf Pavilion, Art in the Dark; cinema entry, the Wallace Arts Trust, several Walker and Hall finalists exhibitions and a Summer Scholarship by the University of Auckland. Natalie holds a PGDipFA with distinction and is currently studying her MFA at Elam School of Fine Arts. She produces a range of events and media at LOT23 Studio and has been a guest curator for Q Theatre, Art Ache, Sky your TV and Threaded Magazine. She is the founder of the artists run gallery mothermother, which seeks modes of curatorial activism.

natalietozer.com, @nattozer
mothermother.co.nz, @mothermother_archive
lot23.co.nz, @lot23studio

Jennifer Mason

Title: Introspective
Year: 2016
Length: 06:46

Many of the videos Mason made in the mid 2000’s were influenced by the British television comedy she watched whilst growing up. Mason was studying towards a BA in Women’s Studies at the time she made the videos and explored some of the ideas she was reading about through a framework of sarcasm, satire, and self-depreciation. Mason was interested in the way comedians such as John Cleese, Jennifer Saunders and Rik Mayall would use their bodies in slapstick style humour. They used their bodies as an object, particularly as an object of humiliation. Mason felt the framework in which these comedians worked was an interesting way to talk about discourse around gender politics.

Jennifer Mason is an interdisciplinary artist working across painting, photography, video, and installation. She studied at Elam School of Fine Arts in 2013 followed by Glasgow School of Art in 2015. Jennifer was born in Auckland and currently resides in Piha.

Instagram: @jennifer_mason_mason

Charlotte Parallel

Title: When do the trees sleep?
Year: 2017 Singapore
Length: 02:35
Credits: Asia New Zealand residency at A.I.R: Instinc Gallery Singapore. Videographer: Chin Wan Xuan

When do the trees sleep? is a poetic question that seeks to draw attention to the energetic forces that intersect within the streets of Singapore. When do the trees sleep? sound walk was part of a telematic performance with Jon He, held at INSTINC Gallery, 24th of March at 8pm. Singapore. Charlotte Parallel uses a DIY light-to-sound transducer/solar panel to amplifier, to play the ‘lumen noise’ as electrical networks in the block around Instinc Gallery.

Charlotte Parallel is a New Zealand artist based in Koputai Port Chalmers working in the fields of sculpture, sound, performance, collaboration and site responsive projects. Parallel completed her MFA at Otago School of Art Dunedin in 2016. She has exhibited throughout New Zealand and internationally since 2010.

Instagram: @charlotteparallel

Edwina Stevens

Title: The Material Thing is Vibrating Into the Emptiness
Year: 2019
Length: 24:12
Format: Single-channel video

The material thing vibrating into the emptiness is a video work considering the change encounter across various materialities. In this work, two phenomena of light, materiality, and time intersect. One element is comprised of winter light filters through a Eucalyptus tree, refracted through a warped 100-year-old windowpane onto the wall, on an oblique angle for a brief moment every day over a week, then it is gone. Another element is also of winter light, filtered through a different Eucalyptus, refracting through a glass on a shelf causing it to ‘bend’ around a corner and streak down the hallway wall. These moments were recorded every morning for the week and compiled together as visuals for live performance. In this production of this video, the visual was arranged to sound, and then in response, the performance is made to the visual, exploring the relationship between the two and the potential they carry in this relationship.
Thematic tags: Performance, abstraction, sound

Title: Lands Line
Year: 2015
Length: 11:09
Format: Single-channel video

This work was developed as a circular projection as visuals for live sound performance.Filmed from the back of the Taieri Gorge Train from Dunedin to Middlemarch, the video has been drawn out across frames to restrict the viewer focusing on any particular detail, prioritising the motion of moving through this valley only accessible for the train-line, time and space blurs past us. The work addresses the colonial lines we Pakeha make and follow on the landscape, following/exploiting water lines and indigenous Māori travel routes, while reflecting on the timelessness and remoteness of rural Southern Aotearoa.
Thematic tags: Landscape, environment/ecology, decoloniality, sound

Edwina Stevens (Dunedin, Aotearoa/Melbourne) is an audiovisual artist working across composition, installation and live performance focusing on synthesized sound, field recordings, found acoustic elements/instruments and obsolete media. Her work investigates audiovisual processes of engaging with places that are collaborative, improvisational and serendipitous, exploring entanglements of the temporal, material and experiential through chance encounters, tangential processes and unanticipated outcomes.

www.vimeo.com/eves
www.disrhythms.net
www.soundcloud.com/e_eves
eves.bandcamp.com

Shelley Simpson

Title: Subduction C
Year: 1997
Length: 19.40
Format: Digitised SVHS
Credits: Audio editing: Joost Langeveld
Subduction C is a recording of a performance of Subduction, a participatory image and sound work exhibited at Artspace, Aotearoa in May 1997

Robert Leonard, then the director of Artspace wrote, ‘Digital technology is revolutionising the way movies are made. Not only is it invigorating existing forms like the feature film and the music clip, it is also making new kinds of moving-image work possible. Shelley Simpson works in one of these new areas, mixing video recordings and live feeds in real time to create moving-image accompaniments for performances by the techno band Unitone HiFi.

Subduction extends this work into an art gallery context. Simpson took her title from geomorphology, where ‘subduction’ refers to the movement of one of the Earth’s tectonic plates underneath another. In a darkened room, a video wash of abstract monochrome mirror patterns is accompanied by an ambient bass drone. The mirror patterns, reminiscent of the old title sequence from Doctor Who, suggest by turns a watery vortex, heat waves, shadows playing on the wall, animated Rorscharch blots, cross-sections of body or brain. The droning soundtrack is also ambiguous, in turn reassuring and ominous. The viewer can interact, injecting two-second audio-visual samples into the mix using a keyboard. By contrast, these samples are coded as either ‘natural’ and ‘mechanical’, but they also formally cross-reference: the opening of a bud resembles the opening of the circular door of a space station, a spinning reel of magnetic tape echoes a spinning seed.

Overlaying and interweaving sounds and visions, Subduction provides an immersive aporia. Opposites like ‘nature’ and ‘technology’ are subducted, losing their direct oppositional status. Subduction exemplifies rave culture’s promotion of the dissolution of distinctions: between self and community, inside and outside, culture and nature.’

Thematic tags:environment/ecology, sound, technology

Shelley Simpson’s multi-disciplinary art practice is concerned with exploring the porous boundaries between the binary concepts of nature/culture and human/non-human. She works with materials that reference ecology and materialism, with specific attention given to agency, affect, labour, transformation, cooperation and symbiosis. Her recent projects explore extractive mining practices as a vehicle for examining wider issues. She is the recipient of a Wild Creations grant from CNZ and DOC for 2018 which funded a project based on 19th century tin mining in Stewart Island. Shelley received an MFA (First class honours) from Elam in 2016. In September 2017 she attended the course Posthuman Ethics in the Anthropocene, with Prof. Rosi Braidotti at Utrecht University, The Netherlands.
www.art.shelleysimpson.co.nz

Gabrielle Amodeo

Title: Slow and mournfully; slow and sad; slow and solemnly
Year: 2013
Length: 33:12
Format: Single-channel video
Credits: Performance by Maria Mall, filmed by Rory Drew
In a single performance of a piece of music split into two parts, the pianist plays through Eric Satie’s Gymnopedies (no. 1 – 3) three times consecutively, first using only one hand, and then the other, with the resulting recordings combined afterwards. Although the pianist initially keeps her timing, eventually the impossibility of splitting her performance takes its toll; the music becomes mistimed, occasionally to the point of discordant plinking. A listener knows what to expect when hearing a familiar piece of music: projecting forward along the path the music will take and jarred if something unexpected happens to a single note. Gymnopedies has a semi-ubiquitous quality: many people know the composition if they hear it, without knowing how they know it, who the composer is or when they first heard it. The spilt-recording of this strangely familiar piece of music unsettles the listener’s expectations as it weaves between being in-time and falling out of time.
Thematic tags: Abstraction, sound

Title: Little Boy Blue
Year: 2008
Length: 02:11
Format: Stop-motion animation
Credits: Song Little Boy Blue by Will Oldham, also known as Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy
In Little Boy Blue, the salt is taken off the kitchen table and made to run for all its worth, via a stop-motion animation made from a rubber stamp. For more than 50 years, New Zealand kitchen tables have been graced with Cerebos Iodised Table Salt and its invitation to “See how it runs”. This logo has become an enduring and endearing quirk of New Zealand’s visual culture. My animation is an acceptance of Cerebos’ long-standing invitation.Shown At: Part of my submission to the 2007 Young Blood Salon, and shown at the finalists’ show at City Art Rooms. In 2009 Little Boy Blue was selected for the International Universities Program at LOOP’09: Barcelona Video Art Festival. It was also shown at Viewfinder in 2011.

Gabrielle Amodeo is a practicing artist and writer living and working in Te Whanganui-a-Tara Wellington, New Zealand. She was the 2015 recipient of the Parkin Prize, and has shown at several of New Zealand’s premier public galleries, including Artspace (Auckland); Dunedin Public Art Gallery (Dunedin); Papakura Art Gallery (Auckland); The Dowse Art Museum (Wellington); and Te Uru Waitakere Contemporary Gallery (Auckland). During 2016, Amodeo completed the Late Winter Intensive Residency at The Banff Centre, Canada. As a current PhD candidate in Fine Arts at Massey University’s College of Creative Arts Toi Rauwharangi, her research, Conceptual Intimacy, looks at forms of intimacy within conceptual art practices. Amodeo’s research has a particular focus on artists who use epistolary creative-nonfiction writing in their artworks, as a form of intimacy-establishment within the artist/artwork/audience-viewer-participant nexus. The thinking that underlies Amodeo’s practice “During an interview on Brian Crump’s show Nights, on Radio New Zealand, I heard that karaoke translated to ‘empty orchestra’. I thought the phrase was beautiful; the starkness of ‘empty’ forms a demanding opposition to the rich voluptuousness of ‘orchestra’. To me the phrase speaks eloquently about processes of information lost/information gained; about the absent but remembered lyrics imperfectly filled by the performer, and the peculiar, almost estranged, relationship between the fixed recording and the temporal iteration of the moment. In my practice, I have long been interested in why things are familiar and how the familiar can be construed differently. Working on the basis of form following idea, I have used multiple mediums. Modelled on and modified from familiar sources and objects, the artwork enables a proliferation of meaning to gather around the source-object, creating an uncertainty and instability of sense. Each work follows a different methodology, logic or form, using some manner of disruption to set the meaning of the source-object at play. Over the past eighteen months, my very labour-intensive art practice has changed increasingly into a written art-practice—particularly creative-nonfiction essays. In my art and writing practice, accrued details are of deep importance. I frequently find the smallest measure of something—a form of drawn mark or the various nuances of meaning in a word—and then pay attention to that, and try to get other people alongside to pay attention to it as well. That intimacy of detail, of looking so closely at something over a considerable period of time, is a form of care that encapsulates my understanding of intimacy. Intimacy is personal. Intimacy is reading. Intimacy is knowledge. Intimacy is observation and attentiveness. It is an engagement of logic and emotion in tandem; long-term research and momentary, sensory experience in tandem. I see my work as being like listening to karaoke at that moment the relationship between song and iteration breaks down. It is a personal observation and altered translation of something familiar, where meaning becomes twisted in action and enunciation, causing an irruption that unravels the known.”

http://www.gabrielleamodeo.co.nz/

Sarah Callesen and Shelley Simpson

Title: The Entities
Year: 2018
Length: 15.00
Format: Two screen digital video
Credits: Audio: Sarah Callesen, video: Shelley Simpson
Our experience of the world around us is often mediated by technology, contributing to the idea that humans are separate from nature. In The Entities, artists Sarah Callesen and Shelley Simpson use visual and audio relationships between human and non-human, natural and artificial, culture and nature. All recording is subjective, mediated by both humans and technologies used in the process. The Entities considers the role of each player within the communication system, where each offers its own affect.

Simpson has created photographs of forest floor worlds in the temperate bush of Rakiura, Stewart Island – an intense, remote environment mostly devoid of human activity. We generally perceive events that occur at human scale, not too big, not too small. We can extend our perceptual range using technology. Scale shifts, time slows. The images are presented as a two-channel video work scaled up to an immersive size. Subtle animation augments the imagery, bringing attention to the sense of process, of visibility, of observer and of mediation.

In response to the macro imagery, Callesen presents an accompanying sound piece that considers change in sound at a qualitative scale other than loudness. Echo and reverb are tropes often used in film to exaggerate the sound of small things. Natural history documentaries often apply imagined sounds to visual footage, particularly for small fauna such as insects, which are too minute to capture with existing technology. Designed sound in film, television and now virtual environments, continue to fabricate what humans imagine unheard phenomena to sound like. Callesen has used designed planet atmospheres and other constructed sounds sourced from stock libraries, as well as manipulated field recordings taken by both artists.

Shelley Simpson’s images were created with the support of Creative New Zealand Toi Aotearoa and The Department of Conservation Te Papa Atawhai.

Thematic tags: Landscape, environment/ecology, sound, technology

Sarah Callesen holds a Postgraduate Diploma in Fine Arts (with distinction) and a Bachelor of Design. Her practice explores a relationship with technology, particularly the mediation of perceptual experience. She works predominantly in the mediums of drawing and sound. Her work has been exhibited as a Merit Award winner in the 2018 Parkin Drawing Prize, as well as a finalist in the 2016, 2015 prize exhibitions. A finalist in the Molly Morpeth Canaday Award (2017), and in the Wallace Art Awards winners and finalists travelling exhibition (2015). The artist had a site specific work in the 2018 Auckland Art Fair ‘Projects’ exhibition, the group show ‘I Understand If You Are Busy’ at RM gallery (2018), and group shows at the George Fraser and Projectspace galleries, Elam School of Fine Arts (2017, 2016).
www.sarahcallesen.com

Laura Duffy

Title: Garden of Purity
Year: 2018
Length: Various
Format: Digital video
Garden of Purity considers how we read and ingest imagery, drawing links through history from art history to advertising. Duffy sees the works as being a layered conversation about Catholicism, advertising, abjection, and queerness. She uses edible materials as a starting point for the series of digitally manipulated photographs in the light boxes and online video works. The series intends to prompt questions about traditional notions of beauty and divinity by blurring the lines between repulsion and desire.
Thematic tags: Performance, narrative, body, abstraction, new media, technology, sound, spirituality, indigenous methodologies.

Laura Duffy’s photographic and video works explore the objectification of the feminine body. Using food as a sculptural material, she draws on gestural techniques found within the world of modern advertising including dripping, dropping, pouring and slow motion. With reference to art historical still life, the work asserts positive identification of women and femmes as subject over object as well as exposing the abject treatment of the feminine image throughout history.

https://www.circuit.org.nz/artist/laura-duffy

Raewyn Turner

Title: Fallible
Year: 2016
Length: 03:49
Format: HD video
Credits: Cinematography: Raewyn Turner & Brian HarrisEditing and green screen: Raewyn Turner

To detect the scent variations in flowers, unscented flowers rotate above a vase which holds a sensor. As the rotating flowers are passed over the smell sensor a computer fan draws their scent past a ceramic bead sensor and a microprocessor measures a voltage dependent on the scent concentration and type. The notes are synthesised in piano voice. The sound changes as the flowers wilt and die. Synopsis: The political and cultural interests of the 1700’s that sent out explorers to collect exotic and rare botanical specimens also created an aesthetic of beauty that embodied the precarious balance of life; one tilt out of balance, one degree of heat, one minute and its gone.
We’re exploring the fragrance of contemporary existence, illusion, and sense-making in a largely visual culture. We’re interested in subliminal odours, airborne particles that affect minds and emotions.

Thematic tags: environment and ecology, technology, history, affect, sound, olfactory

Title: Lucky
Year: 2006
Length: 21:51
Format: Digital
Lucky is a documentary about the making of a fragrance to fortify the lower senses of the gambler playing with chance on pokie machines, which are essentially random number generators. Each perfume bottle is unique as there is a random number generator in the design.
Thematic tags: environment and ecology, technology, affect, olfactory

Title: Pick Up Styx
Year: 2008
Length: 01:04
Format: Interactive software
Credits:
The video interacts with the movements of the players playing a game of pick up sticks which were each fragranced with celebrity perfumes brought to market during the years ofthe war on terror 2001-2008
Thematic tags: politics, history, olfactory, technology, interactive

Raewyn Turner’s interdisciplinary work is concerned with cross-sensory perception and the uncharted territories of the senses. Her works have been shown in numerous national and international exhibitions including Museum of Contemporary Art, LA, Parque de las Ciencias, Granada, Spain, 11th Prague Quadrennial of Scenography and Theatre Architecture 2007,Prumyslovy Palace, Prague, Argentina, Georges Pompidou Center, Te Papa Museum, and Academy of Fine Arts, New Zealand. She has worked with olfaction since 1999 and in collaboration with Dr Richard Newcomb, molecular biologist, NZ. In 2011 she was recipient of a Fulbright Travel Grant for an artists residency at Monell Chemical Senses Center, Philadelphia. Her works include videos, interactive installations, performances, exhibitions and large scale international performance in theatres and stadiums, working as a concept and design artist and lighting designer in collaborations with musicians, orchestras and choreographers.

http://www.raewynturner.com

Denise Batchelor

Title: Shipped
Year: 2013
Length: 03:38
Format: HD Video, ProRes 422
Shipped references the constant passages of container vessels plying the invisible highways of global commerce. Essential to international trade, these vessels carry bulk cargo in order to satisfy the ever-increasing populations need for goods.The sound of the foghorn elicits a warning, a metaphor perhaps for the danger in supporting a continuum in what has become unsustainable growth.

Thematic tags: Landscape, capitalism, environment/ecology, sound, ocean

Denise Batchelor is a visual artist based in the far north of New Zealand, where she works primarily in the mediums of video and photography. Through personal encounters within nature and the immediate world around her, Batchelor explores the subject of connection; those moments in time that evoke a sense of kinship and/or empathy. Capturing moments that simultaneously embrace the familiar, yet reflect the overlooked or unnoticed, Batchelor’s work invites contemplation.
“A visual artist since 2008, my methodology is initially driven by a strong sense of curiosity and a deep engagement with the environment and the biodiversity within it”.
Batchelor has exhibited widely in galleries, art centres and festivals, both nationally and internationally. The recipient of artist residencies and art awards, Batchelor graduated MFA (Hons) from Whitecliffe College of Arts & Design, Auckland (2010).

www.denisebatchelor.com
https://www.facebook.com/denisebatchelor.artist/
https://www.instagram.com/batchelordenise/