Five works/rooms making up this eerily memorable exhibition. You walk in through "Between Darkness and Light (After William Blake)", a large semi-transparent screen with The Exorcist projected on one side and a film called The Song of Bernadette on the other, so that each bleeds into the other; next is a large and appealing room filled with small to medium sized framed photos and mirrors filling up all four walls as well as a central bisecting wall partition, recurring images in a range of scenes and perspectives - some purple flowers, papers being thrown from a city building, an elephant, various gruesome close ups, plenty of others.
Deeper into the darkness, around a couple of corridors, and off to one side is "Through a Looking Glass" - four looped, slightly out of sync large projections of the "are you talkin' to me" scene from Taxi Driver.
Then the highlight, an ominously dark room full of tv screens (about 150 I'd say), all clustered in the middle, facing outwards, arranged roughly on three tiers of stacked milk crates; some silent, some murmuring - images reappearing from the mirror/photo room. Hands holding scorpions, a pair of women's legs elegantly descending a spiral staircase, two flies in separate frames lying on their backs, flames, a man lying with old-fashioned headphones with ghostly Lou Reed and Velvet Underground covers echoing amidst the general low-level muttering white noise audible if you focus on it ("Perfect Day", "Candy Says", "Pale Blue Eyes"), donkeys walking slowly through a stone building, black and white movies, opera, animals' eyes in close up, the Chrysler Building in NYC at different times of day, more. A visceral theatre of mind, imagination and memory.
And, hidden in shadow off to one side (to the extent that a good dozen or so people must have come into the tv room while I was there and none of them even noticed the adjoining chamber), a final, almost pitch black room - "30 seconds text", lit at intervals by a single light bulb, words on the wall about an experiment in communicating with a condemned man's severed head following his execution by guillotine (Languille). I was in there for a few cycles; it was genuinely unnerving after a while.
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Also, two things from a trip to the NGV after: Are We There and specifically "Afraid of Nothing" turns out to be perfect music for the untitled red Rothko in their collection; and the unexpected treat of what I'm pretty sure is a new (at least, I'd never seen it) Olafur Eliasson on display - "Limbo lamp" (2005), the titular lamp beam shining through a circular aperture and then refracted through a suspended set of plastic cylinders throwing a rotating series of coloured spheres and circles around the white walls.
Deeper into the darkness, around a couple of corridors, and off to one side is "Through a Looking Glass" - four looped, slightly out of sync large projections of the "are you talkin' to me" scene from Taxi Driver.
Then the highlight, an ominously dark room full of tv screens (about 150 I'd say), all clustered in the middle, facing outwards, arranged roughly on three tiers of stacked milk crates; some silent, some murmuring - images reappearing from the mirror/photo room. Hands holding scorpions, a pair of women's legs elegantly descending a spiral staircase, two flies in separate frames lying on their backs, flames, a man lying with old-fashioned headphones with ghostly Lou Reed and Velvet Underground covers echoing amidst the general low-level muttering white noise audible if you focus on it ("Perfect Day", "Candy Says", "Pale Blue Eyes"), donkeys walking slowly through a stone building, black and white movies, opera, animals' eyes in close up, the Chrysler Building in NYC at different times of day, more. A visceral theatre of mind, imagination and memory.
And, hidden in shadow off to one side (to the extent that a good dozen or so people must have come into the tv room while I was there and none of them even noticed the adjoining chamber), a final, almost pitch black room - "30 seconds text", lit at intervals by a single light bulb, words on the wall about an experiment in communicating with a condemned man's severed head following his execution by guillotine (Languille). I was in there for a few cycles; it was genuinely unnerving after a while.
* * *
Also, two things from a trip to the NGV after: Are We There and specifically "Afraid of Nothing" turns out to be perfect music for the untitled red Rothko in their collection; and the unexpected treat of what I'm pretty sure is a new (at least, I'd never seen it) Olafur Eliasson on display - "Limbo lamp" (2005), the titular lamp beam shining through a circular aperture and then refracted through a suspended set of plastic cylinders throwing a rotating series of coloured spheres and circles around the white walls.
