Title

Shaun Gladwell.

Venues

Art Gallery Of South Australia. (1 October 2009 – 2 September 2009)

Date

(2009)

Summary

Single-artist exhibition. Located: Australia (SA). Video art

Country of context

Australia

Abstract

This display focuses on the work of Shaun Gladwell, one of five artists representing Australia at the prestigious international exhibition, the 53rd Venice Biennale in Italy (7 June–22 November). Although Gladwell was initially a painter, his art practice now encompasses video, installation, and photography. Gladwell’s interest in how young men creatively respond to their environments, in particular the way skaters, BMX riders, and surfers move through space, has led him to work with video and time-based art. Critical of the way these activities are often depicted on television – speeded up or frenetically edited – Gladwell slows the footage down. This process allows the viewer to study the actions in detail and focuses attention on the grace of the figures, and, according to the artist, on the ‘grammar of gesture’. In Double linework, 2000, Gladwell films a skater on his skateboard traversing the city streets. The camera’s tight frame on the skater’s feet captures the disappearing painted white lines beneath the skateboard. The lines are echoed by the skater’s movement through space, a form of performative drawing.

The photograph Maximus as Narcissus: Broken field of reflection, 2007, belongs to Gladwell’s most recent body of work and explores, according to the artist, ‘… the representation of the Australian landscape and the mythical figures which are projected into these spaces.’

Gladwell received his Bachelor of Fine Art (Honours) at the Sydney College of the Arts in 1996, and his Masters of Fine Art (Research) from the same institution in 2001. His video work has received both popular and critical acclaim and includes cinematically scaled projected images, often as multi-channel, multi-screen immersive installations. [Gallery media, 2009]