I will be presenting my work The Vanishing City as part of Excavation at the Armory Gallery.

I will be blogging about my residency here.

The project I am developing during the residency is an interactive audiovisual installation using archival material called The South Sydney Project. The archive I am working with was created by historian Sue Rosen in the early ‘90s. It charts a social history of 20th century South Sydney through 60 video interviews with people who grew up in suburbs such as Redfern, Surry Hills, Chippendale and Waterloo between 1910 – 1980. Over the past few years I have developed an installation practice based on the re-interpretation, re-processing and re-imagining of documentary and archival material. After stumbling across this archive, I became fascinated with the interviews and negotiated to access the material to re-interpret it into an installation artwork.

The Vanishing City, a new installation work, will open at Firstdraft gallery on 29 April 2009 from 6-8pm.

The Vanishing City is an interactive audiovisual installation that transforms the gallery space into an emotional disaster site. Filling the gallery with sound and video of collapsing buildings, the work taps into social anxieties surrounding disaster—our collective fear of collapsing structures; from the twin towers of the world trade centre, to the world financial markets, to our own personal relationships.

The interactivity of the work draws the visitor in, with each step causing the environment to respond with sound and imagery until the once dormant gallery space comes alive. The Vanishing City places the gallery visitor in the eye of an aesthetic storm, where the possibility of imminent disaster seems enveloping.

Exhibition opens: Wednesday 29 April 2009, 6-8pm
Exhibition continues: to 16 May 2009
Artist talks: Saturday 16 May 2009 at 4.30pm

Narrative exists as a force of nature – it is a basic human way of experiencing our place in the world. We tell stories because it is our tool for thinking about and structuring time, allowing us to project ourselves into the past and into the future. Narrative Drive is an audience-driven interactive sound and video installation that explores the centrality of narrative in human experience. The work plays on the idea that there is an innate ‘narrative drive’ in human beings which compels us to search out and impose narrative structure onto lived experience. Narrative Drive uses the sculptural object of a real car, parked in The Factory car park, as a vehicle for a metaphorical ‘drive’ through this story of storytelling.