MEGAN DUNN

Megan Dunn

A Forest

6 - 29 April 2000


"Is it a kind of dream, reaching into the night? ... Or is it a kind of shadow, drifting out on the tide, following the river of death down stream? Or is it a dream?" - Bright Eyes

Megan Dunn layers popular culture, surrealism and pop-psychology, cliche upon cliche. In her video collages, she recombines material from her favourite paintings, her favourite films, and her favourite music. Her arranged marriages offer uncanny relays of metaphor between apparently diverse source materials, suggesting latent or repressed connections, secret affinities. Dunn uncovers the latent adult themes in childrens entertainment.

As a seven year old, Dunn was terrified by scenes of rabbits gassed in their warrens in the film Watership Down. Revisiting this traumatic moment, she recuts footage from the film to The Cure's song A Forest. This work addresses how children are taunted with premonitions of death.

The other video in the show concerns the in-built obsolescence of love interests. Dunn intercuts sequences from the animated Disney romances Snow White, Sleeping Beauty and Bambi, to The Cure's The Walk. In the final sequence a tangled mass of vegetation captures Snow White as she flees the Hunter. It's no coincidence that the forest is a Jungian symbol for the subconscious.

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