Monitor 3.0 / As you come down (2020)
Monitor 3.0 re-visits and updates Monitor, an exhibition of moving image work from Aotearoa and abroad curated by Sean Kerr and David Watson in 1996. This new exhibition builds on the original curatorial framework and includes three programmes: a programme of commissioned collaborative work by emerging New Zealand artists, a three-part programme of recent work by national and international moving image practitioners, as well as a selection of work from the original Monitor exhibition.
Monitor 3.0 features a commissioned collaborative moving image installation, As you come down by Min-Young Her and Orissa Keane. In As you come down, Her and Keane embed the feelings of the build-up and empty lurch associated with this year as they find footing—post-university but pre-artist—into a series of installations that draw on fiction, humour, and the collaborative process. Think of a pendulum or a swing: there’s a point at which the person or object momentarily pauses, weightless, at its highest point, before gravity pulls them back, swinging to the next highest point, again and again. At the crux of the work is the phrase, “The time has come”, a theatrical announcement often employed as a rhetorical device in advertisements and by politicians that builds expectation but often leads to very little. Wooden periscopes overcomplicate the viewing of a comparatively simple collection of moving image works, ceramic devices appear functional but are, in reality, impractical, while displaced video and sound resonate uncertainty and discomfort.
We would like to thank Creative Clay Studio and Aridium Designs for the generous support in the making of As you come down.
Orissa Keane is a multi-disciplinary artist based in Ōtautahi, who graduated from Ilam School of Fine Arts University of Canterbury in 2019 with a major in sculpture. With a focus on social commentary, Keane’s work is situated in material and process-based studies. Recent work has explored precariousness and precarity and the way these manifest tangibly and intangibly via social, design, and architectural conventions. By subverting and convoluting these conventions and pushing against constraints of the material subject, Keane interrogates purpose finding humour in redundancy.
Monitor 3.0 features a commissioned collaborative moving image installation, As you come down by Min-Young Her and Orissa Keane. In As you come down, Her and Keane embed the feelings of the build-up and empty lurch associated with this year as they find footing—post-university but pre-artist—into a series of installations that draw on fiction, humour, and the collaborative process. Think of a pendulum or a swing: there’s a point at which the person or object momentarily pauses, weightless, at its highest point, before gravity pulls them back, swinging to the next highest point, again and again. At the crux of the work is the phrase, “The time has come”, a theatrical announcement often employed as a rhetorical device in advertisements and by politicians that builds expectation but often leads to very little. Wooden periscopes overcomplicate the viewing of a comparatively simple collection of moving image works, ceramic devices appear functional but are, in reality, impractical, while displaced video and sound resonate uncertainty and discomfort.
We would like to thank Creative Clay Studio and Aridium Designs for the generous support in the making of As you come down.
Orissa Keane is a multi-disciplinary artist based in Ōtautahi, who graduated from Ilam School of Fine Arts University of Canterbury in 2019 with a major in sculpture. With a focus on social commentary, Keane’s work is situated in material and process-based studies. Recent work has explored precariousness and precarity and the way these manifest tangibly and intangibly via social, design, and architectural conventions. By subverting and convoluting these conventions and pushing against constraints of the material subject, Keane interrogates purpose finding humour in redundancy.
Installation Images courtesy of The Physics Room & Janneth Gil
Additional working images and documentation