New five channel video installation curated by Malcom Bywaters at the Adelaide College of the Arts opening on June 7th. Exhibition runs between 8th-18th June, 2018.
Exhibition Catalogue Essay
Uber Memoria X is a video play created in ten parts under the auspice of the wider 51 Paintings Suite collective of slow cinema art which draws parallels from early silent cinema and reconfigured European Romanticist paintings through the guise of a Gothic sublime.
Over its ten year inception, the series has undergone many changes both in terms of how the art was made and moreover, how such work transcends a metamodernist framework through disruptive simulacra, yet now in its completion has arrived at a destination point whereby the parallels of tension, indicative of the flipped videoed image, delve into a broader configuration from Wilson’s love of eighteenth and nineteenth century Gothic imagery spawn from the nightmarish depictions of Fuseli, Goya, Friedrich and the literary work of Horace Walpole.
While lacking in the quintessential Gothic motifs of fangs, horns, blood, and pointed hats, Wilson instead takes a sentiment of Gothic through the sublime which is implied through the gaze of a fixed attention by garnishing characters in worn and tarnished eighteenth century garb and subverted an understanding that, as Hitchcock lamented, implies something is about to happen or has just occurred inasmuch pantomime as the awareness of a pending danger lurking outside of the video frame.
As each act of the play unfolds, we subscribe to an oscillation between the reconfigured image and that of an affected cinematicness grafted through emotive values yielded in parallel but in doing so, subverts the image to reflect a memory of its former from staged reproductions of character poses played out from the original source paintings in ways that transpire a journey into the bleakness of the image and the futility of its re-imagined state.
Malcom Bywaters, curator June 2018