August brings two new solo shows to the digital arts gallery

MAYUMI KIMURA and IVAN SMITH.

MAYUMI KIMURA PLAYBACK

Kimura employs photography and video as vehicles of expression to question the excessive power of the media in contemporary society. Her work makes a critique of the media’s influence on our identity. Her videos often uses images of movie heroines and images of herself that momentarily overlap and separate from each other. Kimura casts herself in different roles revealing her wishes and desires in front of the camera to a disquieting effect. In Blue Bird Street , (part of the Playback trilogy, produced during an artist residency at AIR Antwerp 2008) Kimura ingenuously extends her artistic research using her signature technique: a mixture of existing film footage with that of the artist re-enacting scenes centred around a dialogue of hope and understanding, but the dialogue is between twenty participants who don’t understand the language they’re speaking. The message becomes fragmented and devoid of any significance – an apt metaphor for the condition of modern man.

IVAN SMITH PENNY BLACK

Smith works from the point of view of a sculptor across a wide range of medium and materials from large-scale sculptural installations to up-close-and-personal photographic interventions and video works. This new survey of his digital artworks articulates his ongoing concern with world events and the interface of cultural responses. What emerges is an examination of placement and meaning through a language of contextual interludes, irony and visual manipulation.

Prompted by a reaction to the conflict in Iraq, Penny Black  is a series shifting the scale of the war into miniature images collected from the internet. Duplicated en masse, using a repeating pattern, the miniature images create a field of colour derived from the detail. As the eye is drawn to the single images, a gateway into the macabre is opened and the relentless despair of human tragedy is highlighted.

Penny Black series by IVAN SMITH

The exhibition runs from 04 August to 04 September 2008.