Mikala Dwyer’s Occult Constructivism

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Global warming, carbon tax and environmental sustainability have sharpened awareness about concepts of energy across the world. We think more seriously about what keeps us moving and communicating and how our whole state of being depends on the generation of energy. In Australia there is a slow realisation that carbon tax is ontological—we will be defined in terms of our energy consumption and production, and ‘rated’ on our lifestyle. What you put in and what you get out of life are about to get much more transparent, and each day we learn more about how the distribution of energy determines our fundamental social structures.

Other forms of ‘ontological’ energy are also in a state of change. We are currently in the midst of what is called the ‘immediacy era’, where the explosion in connectivity through mass media and mass consumption is rewiring humankind’s collective nervous system. Human communications are tuned by instant and multiple points of contact, collapsing the distance between what we want and what we have more than at any time in the past. But this state of hyper-immediacy seems to lack vision, and perspective. Media technology overload, rampant consumerism and a political culture devoid of ideology and leadership puts pressure on our perceptive energy and erodes the ability to think clearly about the future, or to have a ‘vision’ of what is and what will be. The lyrics of U2’s ‘Stuck in a moment you can’t get out of’ strike a chord—Michael Hutchence’s suicide is symbolic of an impending social suicide that grips us all.

Mikala Dwyer’s recent exhibition at the Institute of Modern Art in Brisbane brings these fundamental ideas about human communications and ‘vision’ to... The rest of this article is available to subscribers of Eyeline

Mikala Dwyer and Justene Williams, Captain Thunderbolt’s Sisters, 2010. Two-channel video. Courtesy Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, Sydney, Anna Schwartz Gallery, Melbourne, Hamish McKay Gallery, Wellington and Hamish Morrison Galerie, Berlin.

The Silvering, 2010. Installation view, Institute of Modern Art, Brisbane. Courtesy Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, Sydney, Anna Schwartz Gallery, Melbourne, Hamish McKay Gallery, Wellington and Hamish Morrison Galerie, Berlin. Photograph Richard Stringer.