Fmera
It is quite clear on entering the dimmed and spot-lit gallery space, that each element of Glenda Hobdell’s exhibition ‘Fmera’ is deliberately placed to be part of a whole. Light, projected images and digital audio-visuals are woven in a repeating pattern through the traditionally made artworks.
There are eight maps on show, each collaged onto fresco canvas panels which, when read as text, disintegrate from local, regional, provincial, continental and worldly, to become unreadable. In the end, it is the overlay of video through a scrim which renders the final two maps indecipherable. All that is left are the pulsating square map pieces, pixellated by the crosshatched furrows of the surface. There is a Braille subtext—as if we are blinded—and our senses are at least blunted by the staccato beeping of Morse code, which is superimposed on the audio track, seamlessly metamorphosing from a message that reads SMS to the persistent clicking of an SMS that reads SOS.
This exhibition looks at ‘…how we use new technologies to articulate ourselves…and the dehumanising aspects of communicating through new technologies’.1 At the same time it reminds us that communicating today is still done by a species which codifies information for communication. Those of us who know what the information means, know what is meant; whereas those who are not on the same wavelength, will not get it. It is our way of facilitating the getting of information to its target.
Surface and mark making have always been important to LaBudda, and layering a trademark of her work. Across the surface of each map a word is repeated. The text is meaningless except for the patterns and rhythms of its repetition, until