stephen birch, emil goh, brent grayburn, david haines, tony schwensen
The exhibition, Trouble in Paradise, was notable primarily as a showcase for recent videos by Sydney artists. lt admirably filled the normally uneventful January period when many galleries remain resolutely closed. The show was the second in a series of events at Scott Donovan Gallery concerned with current temporal art. Whilst the exhibition was not entirely consistent, it still provided a dynamic arena for the projection of video work in a well organized and accessible format. Overall Trouble in Paradise was distinguished by its heterogeneity, a fact that disallowed it neatly proffering any generalised assumptions about a prevailing video Zeitgeist.
David Haines's work was divided ostensibly into two parts. The first featured a slow panning shot of rugged ice-capped mountains. This was interspersed with static aerial footage of a city illuminated at night, replete with myriad winking lights. Combined, these images suggested familiar nature/culture dichotomies. However in this instance both wilderness and metropolis were entirely computer generated rendering them equally artificial and icy. Contributing to this effect was the artist's deployment of a bird's eye perspective that suspended the viewer in nether regions of virtuality. Haines's piece alternated almost imperceptibly between drift and stasis, sameness and difference. Overall this lent it an unnerving and mesmeric quality that at times became mere repetition. Similarly disquieting was Brent Grayburn's black and white projection. In it we witnessed an isolated female character apparently trapped inside a train carriage. Grayburn's work, like Haines's, was marked by its duality, in this case the tension between the primacy of narrative and the materiality of video. Ultimately this bifurcation served to partially unhinge the work. On the one hand the artist's mastery was assured and seductive