christopher handran artist talks 26.02.2015

aqueous humour

The exhibition Aqueous Humour engages with the experiential logics of immersion, sensation and spectacle, to create a playfully contemplative space.

The works in the exhibition continue an exploration of the mediation of lived experience, and the losses and gains that are incurred in this process of translation.

The exhibition features video works centred around ideas of immersion, submersion and quotidian experience, presented via viewing devices constructed using everyday materials and a diy methodology. These devices relate to both contemporary and historical technologies of vision, including 3D cinema, virtual reality, scientific devices and ‘philosophical toys’ such as the kaleidoscope, the zoetrope and anamorphic mirrors. The works both subvert and are informed by the intertwined histories of art, cinema, and the sciences of illusion and perception.

These technologies are foregrounded in the work, both as objects and as mediators and generators of experience. This involves constructing devices and modifications that literally intervene in the workings of these media, dividing the spectator’s attention between the object and its operations.  By foregrounding the mediating apparatus in the spectator’s experience, the works seek to create a spectacle that playfully subverts its own spectacular nature.

 

biography

Christopher Handran has exhibited widely nationally and internationally, including recent exhibitions at Blindside (Melbourne), Feltspace (Adelaide), SkulpturenMuseum Glaskasten Marl (Germany) and The Block (Brisbane). In 2007 he was awarded the Australia Council London Studio, and in 2015 will undertake a residency at the Institute of Cultural Inquiry, Los Angeles.

 

Image credit: Zan Wimberley

Instagram #fdaqueoushumour