The mediated landscape and the representation of place or rather the non-place of the Freeway landscape is a field of enquiry which has been described in the text 'From Places to Non Places' (Marc Auge 1992) and in the book/exhibition 'Place' curated by Tacita Dean and Jeremy Millar 2005. To date, the discussion surrounding this area of research has centred around photography, video and installation, but animation as a more visually reductive representational language of space, has not been comprehensively explored in relation to the landscape. Beyond the Valley presents a 2-channel animated projection, that presents landscape as animation. It follows on from my earlier 2013 animation titled M1 Homeward, which caricatures the journey along the M1 freeway as an animated, looping landscape of continuous repeating motifs of powerlines, trees and rolling hills. The animated background loop was originally developed in response to economic restraints and largely attributed to Hanna Barbera studios in the 1960's, where the intention was to suggest movement across an expanded distance without the need for extensive drawings. The spatial representation is both infinite in its capacity to loop endlessly, but also contracted in terms of how much visual information is actually represented. Beyond the Valley was commissioned for Latrobe Regional Gallery in Morewell, one of the largest public galleries in eastern Victoria, Australia, and is a member of the Public Galleries Association of Victoria. Beyond the Valley was made in response to the surrounding landscape of the Latrobe valley and the journey to and from this location. For the people of Morewell, the animation acknowledged their local landmark as something iconic and familiar and also recognising it as a source of contention as the LaTrobe Valley Power Stations have been downsized over the years.
History
Subtype
- Curation (Exhibition)
