DIGITAL WALL EXHIBITION: CASCADE
The Digital Wall in the Bunjil Place foyer is a digital gallery space that exhibits video art and generative works from renowned artists and motion designers.
Cascade
Choreographer/performer Gülsen Özer, videographer Vanessa White and composer/sound designer Ania Reynolds present a site-responsive dance film.
Living for the past 10 years in the Southeast of Melbourne has shaped Özer's artistry, enabling her to develop a site-specific practice that has expanded into collaborative screen dance work with White and Reynolds.
Revisiting Özer’s childhood home, Casterton (Gunditjmara country) the trio reimagines Özer’s past experience to create ‘Cascade’. The work reflects Özer’s formative explorations into dance improvisation within the landscape, developing the three artists’ ongoing interests in deep ecology, cultural memory, and imagination.
In the work, the dancer performs durational choreographies that invite new, ways of connecting to place. Similarly, the film techniques used in the work re-imagine our bodies’ engagement with, and contributions to, ecological assemblages.
One of the critical elements of the video work is the interpretation and visualisation of the body and non-verbal experience; finding new ways to document and communicate the unspoken and ineffable. The reformulation of the body in motion explores uncanny effects, producing new, visceral possibilities and meaning.
Various forms of creative expression are integrated into the work to provide conceptual fluidity and material flexibility. The final form and narrative structure are embedded in the imagery of the landscape and environment. The sounds of the landscape and environment are also present in the score. Through audio processing and manipulation, these sounds occupy a space between the naturalistic and the abstract, creating a sense of place that is sonically reflective rather than literal.
‘Cascade’ is the second collaborative film Ozer, White and Reynolds have created. Previous film ‘Split Rock’ screened at numerous International Film Festivals gaining international recognition (2022) awarded Honourable Mention at the Tokyo International Short Film Festival, Japan and an Award of Excellence, Global Shorts Film Festival; (2021) awarded an Honourable Mention at the Toronto Indie Filmmakers Festival, Canada.
About the collaborating artists:
Gülsen Özer is an experienced, professional choreographer whose work in both performance and visual art has evolved to engage a wide range of forms and different audiences. Özer's work adroitly explores both the political and the poetic. Providing audiences with critical experiences designed to facilitate a re-enchantment with our relationships to our body and our environment and to enhance both our mental and physical agency, is the foundation and intent of her work.
The breadth of Özer's expression is best described as allegorical storytelling, using a variety of forms and materials to connect people through mutual experience and identification. Her work is grounded in dynamic collaborative processes that often involve community engagement and her site-specific artworks have a deep consideration of the environmental and cultural context in which they are created and presented. Her work is both emotionally expressive and conceptually rich and explores the dynamics of power and connection and loss.
Significantly, Özer creates experimental work that animates participant engagement and assists others to tell their stories in a vital, resonant way; including Feeling in Full Colour created working with Secondary School students (2021); Resounding a Bunyip Complex Bushfires creative recovery project that focussed on community singing and the sounds of nature as a powerful vehicle for connection, remembrance and recovery (2020/2021); Present Tense a seniors dance performance project involving people with no dance background, the median age of 80, and living in a metro regional location, in the creation of a contemporary dance theatre work (2019); public artworks such as Surrealesville and Kids these days, large-scale visual artworks created in partnership with local youth (2018/19).
Instagram: @missgulsen
Website: www.gulsenozer.com
Vanessa White’s diverse creative output includes video and painting. Her video work is expansive, drawing on ethereal performance traditions, in concert with images of the landscape and environment, to see how the reformulation of the body in motion can be made to perform and narrate meaning. In addition to training in dance and improvisational theatre, Vanessa has a Masters in Fine Art from Sydney College of the Arts and has worked extensively in film and television, including as a visual effects artist on the feature film The Matrix and SBS TV.
Recent National and international recognition include video work ’23° WEST’ screening at the (2022) Nordic Film Festival at the National Arts Centre, Ottawa, Canada; FLOW screen dance series, presented by Australian Dance Theatre, Adelaide (2021); ’Salt Lake’ was acquired for permanent collection at the LaTrobe Regional Gallery, Morwell. Screenings at Košice's Kunsthalle Museum, Slovakia (2020), awarded Best Cinematographer, Alternative Film Festival, Toronto, Canada (2019) collaborative screen and performance work at Espoo International City Theatre, Finland (2018) and collaborative film and glass work at Ebeltoft Glasmuseet (Glass Museum), Jutland, Denmark (2013). Her pieces have also been acquired by Artbank, City of Yarra and Box Hill College of TAFE collections.
Instagram: @vanessawhitemedia
Website: www.vanessawhiteart.com
Ania Reynolds is a multi-award-winning composer, musician and artist who works and collaborates across a range of disciplines. In her work, Ania explores the power of music
and sound as a storyteller to convey emotion and narrative. In investigating the relationship between sound and movement/moving image, she constantly strives to celebrate the extraordinary within the ordinary. Her award-winning audiovisual practice explores the notion of sonic and visual identity of place, gathering, processing and manipulating field recordings and visual footage gathered on location to create kaleidoscopic audiovisual portraits of place.
Ania has worked as Musical Director for Circus Oz and Yothu Yindi and the Treaty Project and has scored over fifty theatre, circus and moving image works including for the Flying Fruit Fly Circus, Force Majeure, Polyglot and Arena Theatre. She won a 2011 Green Room Award for Best Musical Direction in Cabaret - Yana Alana and the Paranas. She produces original music as electronic artist Synthotronica, recently performing at the Buskers World Games and the Chungjang Festival of Recollection in Gwangju, South Korea. Ania has worked with international theatre companies Extraordinary Bodies (UK) and Circkus Cirkor (Sweden), and undertaken international artist residencies at Despina, Rio de Janeiro (2019 and 2022), and the Centre Culturel de Rencontre d’Ambronay in France (2021). She received a 2020 Peggy Glanville-Hicks Commission for audiovisual work Audible Lockdown, created from field recordings and footage taken in the city of Melbourne during lockdown. Audible Lockdown won the Best Short Film Award at the 2021 Experimental, Dance and Music Film Festival Toronto, and received an Honorable Mention as a semi-finalist in the 2021 Prague International Indie Film Festival.
Instagram: @synthotronica
Website: www.aniareynolds.com
Cascade is part of the New Ground 2022 commission program and will exhibit on the Digital Wall in the Bunjil Place foyer from 29 October – 1 December.
