Glide Artist Statement

Glide      

Robert Crispe, Michelle Hall, Jo Lankester
Mixed Media Installation, Dimensions Variable, 2014

Edmund Burke wrote; the sublime and the beautiful are not the same thing. An experience does not have to be pleasant in order for it to illicit an emotional response or to cause the viewer to feel something.

Combining shapes, smells and sounds of birds and aircrafts used in war, Glide is a project which aims to be aesthetically sublime.  Sublime in the way Burke thought of it; moving imagination, creating a sense of uncertainty, but still producing pleasure, while drawing to our attention the transfiguration of society as we react to the relentless trauma of war and endless natural catastrophe.
Robert Crispe’s video art provides a beautiful yet apocalyptic sky for the drone-birds to glide in.  Michelle Hall’s sculptures become the drone-birds flying in the chaos of the apocalypse.
 Jo Lankester’s prints create the rugged, worn texture of the gliders as they negotiate a terrain fraught with danger.
Glide is the second collaborative project between the three Townsville-based artists. The choice to work collaboratively pushes boundaries and comfort zones within their individual practices, diversifying techniques and processes when working on obscure sub-straights. Sharing the experience of creation and presentation, acts to shield the individual artist from the normal anxieties of a creative practice and in turn facilitates innovation.
Showing at Pinnacles Gallery, Townsville

Exhibition Dates: 7 February - 30 March 2014

Robert Crispe, Michelle Hall & Jo Lankester, Glide, Print Assemblage & Video Art, 2014

Glide by Robert Crispe, Michelle Hall & Jo Lankester - Artist Statement / Additional information

Glide

Robert Crispe, Michelle Hall & Jo Lankester
7 February - 30 March  2014, Pinnacles Gallery, Townsville

In our statement we talk about creating an experience where people can think about the trauma of war and natural catastrophe. In their paper 'The New Normal' published in Art Asia Pacific Masters, Lee & Zhang identify how in this decade words like 'crisis' have been used at a significantly higher rate in the media than ever before, crises has become normal.We have become numb to crises.  They go on to talk about how artists respond to the crises. Glide is our response, a response in the context of a garrison town surrounded by world heritage qualilty,  natural beauty. Glide is a combination of birds and planes, which illustrate the rich mixture of crises in our region. An army  making war and a dwindling number of bird species.  We draw on the sublime to attempt a feeling of vulnerability in the viewer to draw attention to how this situation of crises, is glossed over or ignored, but momentarily trapped in the gallery the viewer becomes confronted with an abstracted version of the everyday.  This is precisely the point of engaging the sublime. Just as Damien Hirst once did when he made 'The physical Impossibility of death in the mind of someone living.

Sound & Smell

The sound and smell is an important element to the installation taking the viewer on a sensory journey whilst walking amongst the installation and viewing the work. Melanie Pocock wrote sound and smells ’are intended to bombard visitors’ sensors, causing them to wonder about their intended effects.’