Martini Shot:New Artist Show 2007
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Works: Tim van Dammen | Nova Paul | Clinton Watkins

Each year ARTSPACE’s New Artist show provides an opportunity for a meeting to happen, between the practices of the selected emerging artists, a professional gallery environment, and an audience of engaged and critical viewers.

Martini Shot brings together three artists using film and video media, whose work stands out as activating that point of intersection. Exploring the space between the concepts of the ‘black box’ of cinematic viewing and the ‘white cube’ of the art gallery, the works in Martini Shot return awareness to the experience of viewing, to the nuances of combining time, space, sound and image. Creating new works for the exhibition, each artist brings a different take to the challenge of presenting moving image in a gallery context, individually mining the different languages and structures in film and video.

Nova Paul’s 16mm film Our Future is in the Air utilises the three-colour separation of early technicolour film techniques. Filmed over the course of a day, the layering of colour becomes a means of collapsing time, an effect enhanced by the oral history of the filmed landscape recounted in the sound track.

In Cont Ship #2 Clinton Watkins manipulates the play between image and soundtrack, exploring the effects of sound on the viewing experience. As the bulk of the ship slips past the frame on a continuous loop, the shifting frequencies activate the space of the viewer.

Surrounding the viewer, Tim van Dammen’s media installation A Tension Spanned recreates the effect of panning a space. Spinning across 16 screens, viewing the re-created room becomes a dizzying experience, the details always just out of visual reach.