theObservatory

Back at the main work space, N2. About 4:00pm.

“My process is far simpler than most of the artists here”, Alex Monteith explains, before going on to talk about formal aspects of the work she is developing. Last Saturday, four video cameras were set up side by side, marking out a delimited visual area. A space, roughly that framed by the camera, was physically pegged out in the landscape. The local farmer Alex has been working with, who has won dog-trial competitions for his work, choreographed a flock sheep, by using his voice to guide his three dogs, across the static space the cameras were recording. “It’s essentially a meeting of two different sets of skills”, Alex says. I listen to the voice of the farmer and the barking of the dogs echoing in the clear, still air, communicating something wordless about how clean and open that air is, and of the wideness of its attendant landscape.

That, alongside the long, unbroken shot which traverses the four frames, the rigidly formal framing, and the intent focus on gestural simplicity, bring a dignity and grandeur to the farmer’s activity which is unavoidably readable as filmic-Russian. It is, in other words, like an episode of Country Calendar if it were filmed by Bela Tarr, Tarkovsky or Alexander Sukarov, although its reality is far from an exercise in auteurship, as Alex’s shoot involved some of the other SCANZ artists volunteering their expertise, in a manner which seems the rule rather than the exception in SCANZ’s open, skill-sharing environment. (On her monitor is a still of Derek Holzer caught mid-stride, carrying a great big grey fluffy microphone…)

Meanwhile, the flock, in miniature on the other monitor, seems amoeba-like. In the gallery it will be a projection taking up an entire wall. There is something particularly compelling about the white blob of sheep, its individual animals subsumed, traversing the terrain so fluidly, as the tiny oscillating black dots of the dogs rocket at high speed around its doughy mass, snapping at its spillage. Sometimes the flock, like buiscuit dough in a mould, seems to take the shape of other things, certain geographic landmasses, for instance. The contours of the green-on-green landscape are flattened by the camera into invisiblity until the flock spills across its valleys and curves, revealing and, in a sense, mapping them. It’s a nice idea, to set this farmer, his vernacular local knowledge, and his exuberant dogs alongside the more mathematical data mapping of the area being enacted by other SCANZ participants.