Networked: Simone Hine

Ellipses 2020

11 —17 September 2020

4K Video and Super 8 Telecine. Stereo Sound. 4mins27sec.

“There was a genuine amazement about the technology, and artists were as amazed as anyone else, with the hope that they would look into the new aspects of the medium's potential. But you merely got people turning on that Porta-Pak and recording every moment of what they did. This doesn't say a hell of a lot. Rather, what this says is that the potential is there, and we're kind of stuttering instead of Twittering, trying to figure out what this space is all about. In other words, in trying to fill vacuous space, which has been opened up as a potential area for communication, you end up filling it with such garbage that you're almost stuttering.”

Dara Birnbaum (in conversation with Cory Arcangel) Artforum, March 2009. p. 191-98.

Ellipses (2020) presents a series of small gestures performed while testing digital and Super 8 cameras within a loft warehouse. The gestures performed and captured within a physical space take on the aesthetic of historical performance documentation. However, a series of spatial and temporal disruptions shift attention toward the mediums of capture and distribution. The work playfully presents an encounter across generations of technology, as sites of both experimentation and repetition, of grasping for new aesthetic possibilities, amidst our absorption in existing industrialised formations of media.

Simone Hine is an artist, curator and writer. Her artworks expand across performance, video, installation and sound. She re-contextualises media images, with a particular focus on the cinematic. These media images are expanded spatially and temporally in order to re-examine otherwise transitory moments. Hine is a founding co-director of Kuiper Projects (Brisbane) a contemporary art gallery and project space (2017-present). She was also a founding co-director of Screen Space (Melbourne), a screen-based gallery (2010 – 2016) and Beam Contemporary (Melbourne), a commercial gallery (2010 –2014). Hine holds a PhD from the University of Melbourne: School of Culture and Communication, in Art History. She has presented research nationally and internationally and has written numerous exhibition catalogues.

Networked is a limited online screening program.

This project has been assisted by the Australian Government through the Australia Council, its arts funding and advisory body.