David McDowell: Photo and video works
In Michelangelo Antonioni 's film The Passenger, Jack Nicholson plays a disillusioned journalist in North Africa who escapes the weariness of his own existence by assuming the identity of a dead man. Following the dead man's planned itinerary, he eventually meets the fate destined for his alter ego when he is murdered in a shabby desert hotel room. The film explores a profound existential indifference, an indifference to whom you are or where you go that ends in the ultimate indifference of accepting a meaningless and untimely death.
The passenger is an ambiguous traveller: passive as well as active, one who chooses a destination but is not in control of the vehicle. David McDowell's moody and atmospheric installation explores the anxiety of the passenger, the cocooned indifference of one who travels through a landscape, registering and recording its passage, but who is never essentially there, always en route to somewhere else.
McDowell divides the large T-shaped space at Gorman House into two distinct zones, curtained off at the entrance to create a dimly lit space that is simultaneously expansive and claustrophobic. The stem of the T forms a tunnel featuring two video works, one displayed on a monitor and the shows a loop of slow motion video footage, grainy and speckled with digital noise, of a plane taking off across Osaka Bay. The projected video is shot through the windscreen of a car travelling through the Gotthard Tunnel in Switzerland, slow motion footage of oncoming headlights moving across screen space. Somaya Langley's soundtrack of low engine rumblings contributes to the tunnel-like atmosphere.
In contrast with this claustrophobia, the photographs on each side of the tunnel are panoramas of the Swiss