Tide

BACKGROUND Corompt's Tide forms a key point in projection as an extension of installation practice - an artform whose growth in popularity in galleries and public spaces has coincided with technological innovation and less prohibitive costs. This forward evolution of image quality and fidelity has also coincided with a resurgence of the documentation of the natural world in contemporary art practice and the questioning of meaning in the representation of landscape. The reliance on the camera as mimetic representation precludes alternative modes of non-camera representation. CONTRIBUTION The 2D animated installation of Tide shown at Westspace gallery Melbourne questioned the preoccupation with mimesis in contemporary visual culture, particularly in regards to the moving image and the representation of landscape. It explored how the stylized, simplistic and flattened pictorial representation affects experience in a visually saturated culture where the primary emphasis is on fidelity, resolution and realism. Tide addresses these questions by demonstrating how the language of cartoon graphics and the flattened pictorial space of TV animation may be activated to represent contemporary landscape. SIGNIFICANCE Tide joins a wide variety of survey exhibitions held over the last 20 years. These include Comic Iconoclasm, Splat, Boom, Pow!: the influence of cartoons in contemporary art, High and Low, Comic Abstraction: Image Breaking, Image Making, and Superflat, that have identified the correlation between the cartoon image and contemporary art. The work simulataneously extended this discussion, and innovatively interrogated these modes of representation and use within a multi-screen animation context.