PLUS + MINUS 2000

An exhibition at Stills Gallery, Sydney, during August-September 2000: an event of the Sydney 2000 Olympic Arts Festival

Plus + Minus maps contemporary Australia as a site of human ebbs and flows. The overall title of the work derives from Piet Mondrian's Plus and Minus series of black and white paintings of immense horizontal fields of sea and sky. Mondrian's sea and sky can be seen as a way of packaging 'the world' as a picture of completeness. This contemporary Plus+Minus suggests 'the world' as a field of endless possibilities.

The work consists of two video/DVD installations : Sea and Sky, a two-channel video projection; Eye Contact, a single-channel DVD projection; four lightboxes and a neon wall piece.

A soundscape of different voices create an aural landscape of reveries and half remembered fragments of conversation overheard, or registered, as if during a daydream.

Sea and Sky continues a long-standing investigation in my work into the picture plane's extension into space. The images have been filmed at inner coastal locations around Sydney - La Perouse and Kurnell, North Head and The Gap. These locations flank the entrance to Botany Bay, the birthplace of Aboriginal dispossession and of white Australia, and Port Jackson, the earliest gateway for new arrivals.

Eye Contact is as full as Sea and Sky is apparently empty. It is the culmination of a seven-year exploration of the landscape of the face. Since 1990 I have been exploring what does it mean to encounter a face, in the way facial features have moral meaning for us, especially when we read a caption or a story that claims to identify the person's relationship to 'something'. Previously, I worked with painted images based on media images. This work focuses on the photograph and the near-anonymous subject. Since late 1992 I have systematically photographed people with whom I come in contact. There are 1000 images in the series. Each image is 'captioned' with the person's first name, occupation and country of birth. They are mostly unknown people from a wide spectrum of racial and social origins who are instructed to adopt a neutral expression and to close their eyes before being photographed - on the one hand not dead or asleep, on the other, not awake, but somewhere in between.