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.”