Artwork Labels
The same crowd never gathers twice
Yona Lee
Born 1986 Busan, South Korea; lives and works Auckland, Aotearoa and Seoul, South Korea
Upper-floor composition 2024 stainless steel, objects
Commissioned by the University of Melbourne, 2024. Courtesy the artist and Fine Arts, Sydney.
Yona Lee’s site-specific installations use the material language of the public realm: industrial plumbing, electrical conduit, handrails and barriers that guide, support and restrict movement through shared space. These implicitly functional environments are punctuated with furniture and other everyday objects that highlight tensions between public and private experience, structures and mobility, lightness and heaviness. A classically trained cellist, these tensions hold dual meaning for Lee; in music as in art and public space, there exists overarching structure and space for improvisation.
Upper-floor composition accepts the form and fixed parameters of Buxton Contemporary’s heritage architecture, while blurring the boundaries of the gallery and connecting different zones of activity and observation. Distinct visual cues invite physical interaction while at the same time denying it. By disrupting the intended function or expected location of familiar objects, Lee invites viewers to reflect on how these elements support and shape the invisible structures and routines of daily life.
Laresa Kosloff
Born 1974 Melbourne; lives and works Melbourne (anticlockwise)
Fountain 1998
Super 8 film transferred to video, monochrome, silent 00:48 minutes, looped
Office skate 2011
Super 8 film transferred to video, monochrome, silent 03:56 minutes, looped
Jogathon 2006
Super 8 film transferred to video, monochrome, silent 02:51 minutes, looped
Courtesy the artist and Sutton Gallery.
Laresa Kosloff’s practice examines representational strategies linked by an interest in the body and the tension between received cultural values, collective action and individual agency. Produced over more than a decade, these digitised Super-8 works document incidental actions and interactions against the built environments of Melbourne, the USA and Japan. The works call attention to performative aspects of everyday life, and the subtle dynamics and social choreographies that unfold in public space.
Super-8 film—with its nostalgic association with home movies and amateur recording—captures the spontaneity of real-life, while the monochrome, miniature format filters out recognisable context and narrative. Without the anchor of a spatio-temporal index, Kosloff’s audience inside the gallery is encouraged to consider the act of watching itself, and their own role within this process.
St Kilda Road 2010
Super 8 film transferred to video, monochrome, silent 01:56 minutes, looped
Courtesy the artist and Sutton Gallery.
Trapeze 2009
Super 8 film transferred to video, monochrome, silent 00:26 minutes, looped
Michael Buxton Collection, the University of Melbourne Art Collection. Donated through the Australian Government’s Cultural Gifts Program by Michael and Janet Buxton, 2018.
Taryn Simon
Born 1975, New York; lives and works New York
Assembled Audience 2018 sound installation
This work was produced with support from and first exhibited at MASS MoCA, Massachusetts USA, where it was curated by Alexandra Foradas. Courtesy the artist and Gagosian Gallery, New York.
Historical accounts of leaders using applause as a barometer of public opinion can be traced as far back as the Biblical Old Testament and ancient Rome.
Techniques for manipulating public adulation are nearly as old: professional ‘ringers’ or ‘claques’ have been hired for millennia to induce crowds to applaud at speeches, plays, and other public events, simulating approval and popularity. Today, the convergence of technology with demagoguery has created new opportunities for manufactured applause, with for-hire influencers and computerised bots distributing endorsements, up-votes, and retweets across social media platforms.
Recent studies have referred to applause as a ‘social contagion’ where participation is not necessarily a conscious show of affirmation, but often the result of discomfort at nonconformity.
Assembled Audience gathers individual audience members—each representing diverse, and even conflicting political, corporate, and ideological allegiances—into a single simulated crowd. As part of her ongoing investigation into the rituals of public life, Simon worked with a team of producers in Columbus, Ohio over a one-year period, to record applause from one individual at each event—concerts, sporting events, and political rallies—held at the city’s three largest venues. Colours sampled from the main interior walls of these venues have been averaged to generate the exterior wall colour of the octagon.
Located in the heart of Ohio, the USA’s most accurate bellwether state, Columbus—nicknamed ‘Test City U.S.A.’— closely mirrors the nation’s demographics and is a critical gauge for predicting political outcomes and testing new commercial products and marketing strategies for America’s largest grocery, fast food, and retail companies, including Kroger, McDonald’s, and Victoria’s Secret. Every successful U.S. presidential candidate of the past two decades campaigned at one or more of the venues in Assembled Audience, and every candidate who won Ohio went on to win the general election. Each event is documented on the gallery wall, along with the name of the participating individual. The installation uses a program to randomize the selection of individual recordings: the same crowd never gathers twice.
Cate Consandine
Born 1972 Sydney; lives and works Melbourne
RINGER 2024
three channel HD video projection installation, sound
9.1 channel audio (Voice, Viola, Rhodes 73 Mark 1, Union Chapel Organ, Juno 106, Bass Drum, Cymbal, Tam Tam, Crotales, Upright Piano, Field Recordings, Synch Sound
13.20 minutes, looped
This project has been funded by the Australian Council of the Arts and the Faculty of Fine Arts and Music, University of Melbourne. Courtesy the artist and Sarah Scout Presents.
Working across film, performance and sculpture, Cate Consandine’s practice explores the physical expression of psychological and emotional states, centring on the relationship between bodies and their contingent registers . Filmed in the Martyn Myer Arena at the Victorian College of the Arts, RINGER is an embodied choreography of moving image, action sequencing and sound. The work meditates upon the peripheral dimensions of the female gaze, capturing the alertness of its acute sense, psyche, and immersive power. The work invites the viewer to grasp at the forces and encounters that reach toward the outer limits of the visual field. The circular filmic medium is the arena in which Consandine re-imagines the world of roller derby as a tensile site of violence between players.
Artist Cate Consandine
Director of Photography Bernard Winter
Composer François Tétaz
PRODUCTION
Production Manager CJ Welsh
B Camera Operator Daniel Gallagher 1st Camera Assistant Austin Haigh Key Grip Tony Hall
Grip Assist Michael Bespalov Lighting Designer Candy Cooper Costume Peta Souwer
Set Photographer Lucy Foster
PERFORMERS
Derby Players Anna Pave U’Ova, Biscepsual, Bianca Sciarretta, Kelley Walker, Sarah Love, Slamazon
Viola Erkki Veltheim
Voice Suzy Tetaz
POST–PRODUCTION
Editors and Visual Effects Jacob Perkins RDYSTDY, and Bernard Winter
Colourist Daniel Stonehouse WE ARE CRAYON
Audio Visual Screen Design Gotaro Uematso
The artist would like to acknowledge the assistance of the Museums and Collections Department and the School of Film & TV, University of Melbourne; the Victorian Roller Derby League, Bernard Winter, Stephen Garrett, Sanja Pahoki, and Marion and Terry Consandine.
Riana Head-Toussaint
Lives and works Sydney
Animate Loading: 1 2022 single-channel video, sound 15:53 minutes, looped
Animate Loading: 1 was originally developed and presented as part of Concrete, Pari, curated by Rebecca Gallo and Kalanjay Dhir. Courtesy the artist.
Animate Loading is a responsive, iterative choreographic work informed by the architectural and social context of the places where it is presented. A dynamic group of performers draw on their diverse movement languages and embodied experiences to activate the space, reconfiguring interactions with place, architecture and each other. It is a disability-led project with access-centred principles at its core, designed to enable collaborating artists to create as freely and fully as possible. The work is an embodied call to action: to disrupt, resist and change our interactions and relationships within and around so-called public space.
Animate Loading first took place on a rooftop carpark on unceded Dharug Land in Parramatta, Sydney. This film version—Animate Loading: 1—exists to make the work accessible to those who could not attend the performances, and seeks to convey the perspectives, feelings, textures, tones and moods within the live work. It features a number of distinct visual styles to enhance the work’s themes, and heighten the embodied experience, including first-person bodycam, drone work, and surveillance-style cinematography.
In July, Head-Toussaint will return to Buxton Contemporary to develop new site- specific choreographic work Guided Wrestling. Sign up to stay updated.
NOTE TO VIEWER
In this film, the material is repeated twice. The audio- descriptive track that accompanies the second viewing facilitates another form of witnessing the movement, derived from disability culture—an alternate use of language that distills the previously unseen into the seen and heard. The audio-description has been written from multiple points of view, to reflect the changes in camera point of view.
The audio-described material begins at 7 minutes 44 seconds.