Tuna mau seeps'

My eyelids flicker, your frame echoes the sun, our sun that we look at with closed eyes, the moment of opening colours divide, distorting my view.

Waiatarau's park Rimutahi sits dressed by human with subtropical exotics, nestled in the over coat of innercity suburbs.
Waiatarau. Your songs rise up. Silent. From the ground as I walk, silent. I hear nothing. I feel everything. I feel your songs. Your songs are silent. I hear nothing. I hear everything. I feel your song. I walk with you singing, we have races down the slides, you always win. We laugh, we play the guitar with our tennis rackets. We laugh, you pretend to be the mum and call me a name that's not my own, I smile at you with tears and wonder what your grandmother would see in you. You laugh I smile. I feel the lines on my face now.

It’s autumn and the waxeyes are travelling around the gardens in big busy groups feeding on what's left of the flowers from summer. The trees are bare and it surprises me how many birds live here. Kingfishers still come, even though the bays sparkling waters have been covered and the eel creek drained generations before you became my home. The sun lies low, and gold spreads over everything, sending our shadows far across the field behind us. Light shudders.

Tuna mau seeps.
Hands have covered you, hushed your gentle breath. Tuna mau, who was buried alive long ago. Tuna mau seeps. Choking quietly. Heaving rhythmically upwards your pulse pushes. Tuna mau seeps. Seeking air, yearning for light. When Tuna mau seeps tears, the ground becomes soft underfoot and my shoes get wet.

- Layla Rudneva-MacKay

Our Future is in the Air, film still 2007

Cont Ship #2, installation view at ARTSPACE

In Watkins’s Cont Ship #2 you see a ship slide in and out of shot, right to left. It slides from wall to wall, corner to corner at each end of the space. The image is doubled, not mirrored; the mass continuously slips through the wall at both ends of the space. You, the viewer, stand in-between – in the empty hull of the gallery space – you and the accompanying soundtrack. The camera does not shift from its steady tripod-mounted gaze, however the soundtrack does. The soundtrack ebbs and flows. It comes and goes, much like you.
Ships are nomadic wanderers through time, sliding from time zone to time zone as they cross the ocean. Our way of life is absolutely dependent on the sea and the ships it bears. Globalisation, in spite of all its clever know-how, still yields to the physical reality of the sea. The ship that slips by in Cont Ship #2 is for leisure, the leisure class: 151,000 tons of floating real estate. It’s a surface of colour too, paint actually, made flat by the digitisation of its 345-meter long bulk.

Rather than fetishise the technical capacities of the moving image and explain away a love for the medium, the shot is direct, neat, ship-shape. It’s hard to put into words - something to do with the irreducibility of shots to words. Watkins achieves a kind of cinematic hypnosis, but really it’s more like a daydream; these images don’t quite duplicate reality. The coming and going of the soundtrack disrupts the presence of the ship and drives it forward – delay, reverb and repetition propel it through the water now.

- Dane Mitchell

LAY-Z-BOY

If contemporary video art can be said to solicit, by turns, a deconstructive rhetoric of gaps, discontinuities and ellipses, and a politicised rhetoric of attacking, confronting or upbraiding the viewer, what distinguishes Timothy van Dammen’s A Tension Spanned is its sense of calm, homely invitation. Take a seat, make yourself at home, it proposes, as its circular gathering of monitors offers up the spectacle of a serene domestic living space – sofas, chairs, tables – revolving seamlessly around us. The inviting domesticity of its content finds its complement in the compliant transparency of its form: A Tension Spanned, in fact, appears to aspire to a kind of representational plenitude in which nothing is ever lost, misplaced or ambiguous. Eschewing both the conventional narrative cunning of information withheld, and video art’s calculated ambiguity, the ‘narrative’, of which the film constitutes a kind of embryo, is laid out before us with all of the lavish indulgence of a three-piece lounge suite. Temporal development transmuted into full, room-wide panorama, A Tension Spanned enables a single, languid glance to take in quite as much as a careful concentration. The anonymous figure moving about in the background personifies just this opulent excess of information, redundantly describing aloud their entirely visible activities: “now I am making a drink of coffee, now I am sitting on the couch...” Aligning, then, the interpretational ease of its form and the domesticity of its content in a kind of paroxysm of surround-sound domesticated bliss, a fantasy of total cinematic immersion, A Tension Spanned appears to promise some serious R & R – both physical and interpretational – in the otherwise austere gallery environs.

The manifest irony of the work – and one referent of the “tension” alluded to in the title – is that in an institutional space that is most at home when it is most ‘on edge’; most exposed to the perils of the interpretational gap and the hazards of artistic attack, ‘rest and relaxation’ is never as restful or relaxing as it seems. To those schooled in this kind of dedication to their own discomfort, the immediate effect of such visual and spectacular plenitude is less blissed-out satisfaction than anxious semiotic vacuum. Rewarding the passing glance, the channel surfer, the lay-z-boy, where conventional video work valorises the dividends of vigilant attention, A Tension Spanned’s narrative abundance paradoxically leaves the gallery-goer a little short of cultural change. Crucially, however, Van Dammen’s uniquely furnished gallery space functions less to foreclose engagement than to foreground the question of what kind of engagement might occur when there is no engagement required. Mocking the identification of meaning with a kind ofpainful labour, van Dammen invokes the spectacle of the culture-savvy couch potato, putting cultural engagement back on the couch where it all began. What emerges is a subtle re-upholstering of the time-honoured feminist invocation of the gendered tension between gallery space and domestic space, as van Dammen invites us to collapse the difference between the frameworks of engagement attendant on these spaces, and in the process to interrogate assumed oppositions between entertainment and art, between work and play, between consumption and its critique. Redecorating the gallery as living room, A Tension Spanned is a work that, if it interrogates the spectator’s interpretative norms, always does so in the nicest possible way, inviting us to sit back, relax, and enjoy the critique; if it addresses us directly, it is only to offer us a cup of tea.

- Pansy Duncan


A Tension Spanned, film still