1/65 Murray Street Hobart, Tasmania
5-27 April 2019
The video
The Learning, 2019
Video, 21:59 minute loop
Filmed by Simon Ozolins ACS
Production music courtesy of www.epidemicsound.com
The Images
Page 42; Page 60, 60A, 60B, 60C; Page 49; Page 67; Page 77; Page 46, 47; Page 48; Page 100, 2019
Digital print on Hahnemuhle photo rag paper
Each image: 110cm wide x 68.86cm high
The Sculpture
The End and the Beginning, 2019
Birch and structural ply, glue, silver paint, metal fittings
Zero: 2410mm x 1652mm x 600mm
One: 2410mm x 600mm x 600mm
With special thanks to
Simon Ozolins, Cinematographer
Gerard Willems, Willems Frames
Robert and the team at Xanderware
Gerrard Dixon, Tasmanian School of Art, University of Tasmania
School of Creative Arts and Media, University of Tasmania
Images: Brigita Ozolins and Jack Bett
The Learning 2019
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Things have their root and branches.
Affairs have their end and their beginning.
To know what is first and what is last will lead near
to what is taught in the great learning.
Confucius, from The Great Learning, (500 B.C.E), translated by Ezra Pound
The Learning has been inspired by the forest as an archetypical site of testing and transformation, and by two philosophical texts. The first text is one of the four books of Confucianism, which offers a guide for moral self-cultivation. This is achieved through learning, or ‘the investigation of things’, which leads to a state of balance and harmony through a better understanding of the world. The second is Spinoza’s Ethics, a controversial text first published in 1677 that critiques traditional philosophical conceptions of God, nature, the mind, the emotions, the intellect and the universe. Spinoza’s works were subsequently banned by the Catholic church and were studied in secret until they were translated from Latin into English in 1856 by George Eliot. They have influenced many philosophers and thinkers including Goethe, Hegel, Nietzsche, Wittgenstein and Deleuze.
The Learning has also been inspired by the minimal formal beauty of the numerals zero and one, the two symbols that are the basis of all digitally produced information. The all-pervasive emergence of the digital in contemporary life and its unstoppable creep into the natural world is therefore at the heart of the project.
The exhibition consists of three interconnected elements: a video projection accompanied by an audio track, two large scale suspended sculptures and a series of eight framed images.
Details
Links
The video features a woman sitting at a small table in a forest. She wears glasses made from tree rings and in front of her is a large old book with pages that appear to be completely blank. The woman turns the pages very slowly, pausing at each as if able to read something that we cannot see. The audio track is haunting and otherworldly, suggesting that something unexpected is about to happen.
The eight digital images are double page spreads from the book that features in the video, seen from directly above. These pages depict ghostlike traces of maps, diagrams, text from Spinoza’s Ethics and other mysterious objects. It is as if we are seeing what the woman wearing the wooden lenses sees.
The sculptures are a large scale, silver wood grained ‘zero’ and ‘one’ that hang just a few centimetres from the floor of the gallery and move very slowly, spinning from their central axes. They represent the merging of the natural world with the digital, and the organic with the inorganic, and suggest the presence of an unknown but powerful force.