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Meri Blazevski, Leslie Eastman, David Noonan

Curator: Kate Shaw

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@, the title of this exhibition makes reference to the grammar of an unmarked email address, pointing to the concerns of the show (which was part of Melbourne's Next Wave Festival).

One enters the main space at 200 Gertrude Street gallery through a white passage. Inside the light is dim, with only the flickering glow of six separate screens shared between three artworks. These pieces are effectively autonomous, but the whole exhibition space is infused with the same nameless, placeless desire associated with synchronisation. Artworks involving escalators almost constitute a genre of their own, and there surely is something surreal about the cyclical repetitions of a mechanical pathway. Meri Blazevski's City Loop consists of three monitors showing the same short generic escalator scene. Cut into the white gallery wall at eye level, the video images radiate from the wall as if dissolved into it. An anonymous commuter (an elderly man with a fedora hat and a shopping bag) goes up, disappears, and then returns to go up again. This same micro-narrative of our modernity is presented at three different speeds. On the left monitor, he moves at 60% of real-time speed, in the middle at 40%, and on the right at the painfully slow 20%. The space thus acquires an uneasy temporal dimension, articulating a relationship between body, time and space and a desire for difference in repetition.

David Noonan's film-video piece, M3, consists of two large adjacent video projections, split by a corner wall. One side shows a frontal view of a young man driving a car, and the other a young woman. In both, the portraits of the drivers are overlaid with their views of a freeway