weehiccup:scope
Left to right: Still Sleeping, Terresa Andrew / Tensegrity, Andrew Last / Kickn gainst the..., Rebecca Pilcher / Tight Sleep, Emily Pauling / highland, Kim Pieters
wee hiccup explored repetition and patterning through various forms of repetitive in digital video, sculpture and photography.
Contributing artists were Teresa Andrew, Andrew Last, Emily Pauling, Kim Pieters and Rebecca Pilcher.
Inspired by Andy Warhol’s video “Sleep”, Teresa Andrew explores the moment between waking and falling asleep in what she refers to as "repeated stillness". In this series of polaroids Andrew's quiet deployment of repetition is as compelling as her previous performance and video work where the ritual of repetition is played out to the point of exhaustion. The images singularly offer a moment of rest however the reference to 24 frames per second suggests the continuum of an endless sleep which in itself is a series of eternal repetitive moments.
Kim Pieter’s video work characteristically engages the viewer through an extended focus on duration and detail. Often her work invites haptic looking where the skin of the screen becomes apparent as we move along the surface of the content rather than plunging into deep space. In the video ‘highland’ the artist extends our engagement which hinges on the disruption of the pulse; we are drawn toward a metronomic form only to be interrupted by the random intrusion of a subject driving in opposition against the repeated parabolic.
Emily Pauling makes sculptural works that both embody repetitive processes and compel us to enter these spaces psychically; we are captivated by the intensely repetitive labour involved in their fabrication and fastidious attention to detail while we imagine our bodies within the life-size enclaves encountered in the work. In this instance Pauling's work extends these ideas into a site specific form with components enmass and a space which suggests an escape from this hyper-productivity.
Rebecca Pilcher’s recent installation works involve video, sound and the creation of highly mediated environments. In her video "Kickn gainst the.." Pilcher explores biological processes such as breathing, the heart beat and muscular spasms. Through digital manipulation she extends the performer’s ability beyond actual physical endurance in what she describes as "the frottage of repetition ...getting somewhere without moving".
Andrew Last continues his lineage of sculptural and jewellery works which explore construction and laws of physics through repeated units. His absorption in the process of understanding the underlying mathematical orders which enable these constructions permeates every aspect of his practice; these include the development of detailed CAD drawings, the design and making of specific tools to build individual components and then the construction of these complex forms. In this instance Last intends to reinterpret the Tensegrity structures developed by Kenneth Snelson and Buckminster Fuller in the 1960’s into a jewellery context.