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I first started thinking of paint as a weighty physical material at the end of my first year at Art School. In preparation for the final exhibitions, everything received a frenzied application of white acrylic to banish the year’s smears and splatters and gallerise the institution. This was an annual procedure; the school shrank year by year, its rooms dwindling, diminishing minutely with every thick and gloopy layer of smoothing, redeeming, neutralizing white paint.

Auckland artist Rohan Weallean’s work realizes just this bulk, the skins of his works drip with layer upon layer of bright acrylic housepaint. His paintings and sculptures use paint not so much as a medium, but as a substance, a material. The heavy, layered coats get whittled and carved, sliced back and pasted together again with yet more paint. There is an object in Wealleans studio that is a kind of totem to his methodology. Years ago, it started life as a speck of paint. Thousands of coats later, it is a lump the size of a kid’s inflatable beach ball, bubbling with surface accretions and heavy as a cannonball.

There is a weird beauty about Weallean’s works, with their orifices and oozings, their often lurid colours, their strange mix of the chemical and the natural. Grown layer by layer, they have something of the quality of tree rings or coral or toenails, but their slightly rubbery, slick and highly coloured surfaces are definitely industrial. While Wealleans romances the idea of the organic (one of a series of hanging sculptures is called Disciple of the Pearl), he reconciles it with the synthetic by describing his creations as natural extensions of alien worlds – abundant but potentially dangerous life forms. Planet Spore, made in 2004 for the Botanic Gardens in Christchurch is, like other large-scale works, carved from polystyrene with a shell of fiberglass before being daubed with many layers of paint. A lurid shade of electric chartreuse, embellished with circles of shallow cuts, it is a huge cartoon eyeball landed on the lawn, a demon seed. The hanging works Tingler and Disciple of the Pearl resemble pregnant bellies or lumpen punchbags or perhaps great tears of paint. Cups and funnels above the sacs imply that they are formed by dripping, like stalactites. Nostril-like holes suggest a breathing presence, or perhaps portals for a giant colony of iridescent wasps. Eater of Worlds, a recent work on paper, is clustered with cones and flakes of paint that form bright scaly swarms like oysters on a rock, or leave brilliant trails as they squelch limpet-like across the page.

The surfaces of paintings and objects are slit, scooped and gouged out with a craft knife. The sharp straight blade makes slightly ragged incisions, chipping out intricate patterns. Cuts into the paintings’ surface evoke the drillings and slashings of Lucio Fontana, but rather than revealing a space beyond the work’s surface, Wealleans’ incisions expose their innards. His ritual guttings of paintings owe something too, to Viennese Actionist Hermann Nitsch’s orgiastic meat festivals, drawing on the same nostalgia for gory primitive rites, but here everything is a plasticized replica, and the blood is pure acrylic.

There is violence to the work, but is bright, cartoonish and splattery. Horrorgami are layered paper works that burst out of horror movie posters, eclipsing the original scary creatures. The Horrorgami are constructed by analogy to the sliced paintings: many layers of paper or neoprene are slashed and peeled back, erupting out of the work’s top layer like toothy fringed mouths: monstrous, unclassifiable, consuming. Many are adorned with scales of paint from other works, pasted together with more oozing acrylic. Wealleans describes how in his work, “everything feeds off itself”. This is often literally true; refuse from one painting is recycled into the next, and the works themselves look as if they could end up gnawing on one another if left unsupervised.

In his search for forms and iconographies, Wealleans wades unabashed into murky and contested realms. He relishes the awkward and commericialised aspects of tribal art, lolling in faux primitivism. A favourite stand-by of modernism (from Dada and Picasso on in), wholesale appropriation of ‘primitive’ indigenous cultures is now inevitably heavily freighted with questions of power relations. For Albino, a 2004 exhibition with Frances Upritchard (another enthusiast for shabby ethnographies), Wealleans invented a fake Polynesian tribe replete with ceremonial regalia and the ritual sacrifice of paintings that disgorged streams of acrylic as he sliced them open. In a culture sensitive to appropriation and indigeneity, the question of exploitation or homage is never quite settled with Wealleans. When challenged, the artist disingenuously detaches himself from the work, or points to the all-consuming incorporations of popular culture as a model. But this reappropriation of an appropriation remains questionable when the ancestors on display belong to someone else – when the artist is part of the dominant culture, enjoying the privilege and concomitant transparency of identity that implies ¬– when the artist can be an artist unexplained and un-hyphenated.

So clearly a devotee of the shonky archetype, Wealleans has his own creation myths: the story of how his cut and layered work was spurred by an original windfall of mistinted housepaint; his winning of the Waikato Art Award with a work commended by judge Tobias Berger as a ‘bright pink vagina’; his identical twin brother crashing into the opening of his show In the Shadow of the Beast in a yeti suit and marauding the punters; the rumour that he’s not a Pakeha, a white guy, but an albino Polynesian.

Wealleans spent 2005 at Otago University in Dunedin as the Frances Hodgkins Fellow. A major product of that year was Tatunka (Dunedin Public Art Gallery, Roslyn Oxley9). The show was another cross-cultural encounter, this time loosely referencing the film Dances with Wolves, a mainstream Hollywood attempt to deal in a balanced way with the old Cowboy and Indian trope. Giant dreamcatchers fill the gallery, casting spidery shadows, while Ennio Morricone’s theme music to spaghetti westerns play in the background. Originally an Ojibwa charm protecting sleeping children from bad dreams by filtering out nightmares, this Native American form has long been commercialised and co-opted by New Age crystal- and dolphin-lovers. Weallean’s dreamcatchers are huge, adorned with baby rattles, beads, fishing buoys, neoprene streamers, and, in one instance, a paint-dipped badminton racquet. Wealleans describes their origin in a desire to make paintings out of string. They thread together a miscellany of objects, a kind of dream flotsam snared and coated in dripping acrylic.

Along with his ethnographic raiding trips, Wealleans plunders the back-catalogue of feminist art. His ongoing fascination with central core imagery is well known. But Wealleans’ gashes and slits are not the glazed porcelain vulval arabesques of Judy Chicago’s Dinner Party; they are more like the toothy orifices of an Alien movie, cheery coloured vagina dentata.

Figurative paintings form another strand of Wealleans’ practice (which he explains by claiming he needs something to do while the layers of paint are drying). In King Fisher (2007), a recent show at the Gus Fisher Gallery in Auckland, women with snaky hair and orgasmic expressions. Stringing around these images are strands of emoticons, the sketchy faces a shorthand of eyes and mouths, a wordless language. Radiating and tessellating across the paintings is a toothy vulval shape. The smoothed and stylized repeated form is perhaps best described as a vesica piscis: a cunt-, but also eye- or fish-like form often used in Christian iconography in relation to the Virgin Mary. It’s argued the vesica piscis’ association with Mary represents an incorporation of earlier goddess cults. In Conception of the Priestess of the Bush a koru, a spiraling parade of brightly coloured exotic animals is presided over by a come-hither princess. She is a goddess giving birth to the world, but she and the other dark-haired women in these works reveal their porn magazine origins with their theatrical expressions of ecstasy – mimes of pleasure with an eye on the paying customer. Wealleans’ works share a second-wave feminist fascination with a female sexuality marginalized by the history of western art, but the brightly patterned come-hither stylings reapply just that male gaze which feminists critique.

Most disturbingly, from the show PEGD (Hamish McKay, 2005), Maid (2005) is an armless, legless female figure suspended in front of a painting adorned with a swarm of peeled-apart, lippy cuts. The figure is a cross between a hanged man and a parti-coloured Venus of Willendorf, a fetish with a vulval opening sliced into its centre. Like the Paleolithic Venus, Maid is faceless, but clearly sexed. Part of the same exhibition, Maiden is a similar, but more powerful standing figure, looming in the centre of the gallery in a white, low-cut, sci-fi styled frock, like some haughty alien empress. The dress and the bald ‘do in this instance recall the glamourous alien cyborg played by Persis Khambatta, former Miss India, in the first Star Trek film (1979), her beauty swathed in layers of intergalactic exoticism. There is both pleasure and danger in the works, a flirtation with the monstrous feminine.

In PEGD (or Planet Earth Geology Department), sedimentary layers of paint are the subjects of an alien geological survey. The gallery is full of chunks carved out of previous works, scooped-out hunks individually bagged, gridded and framed on the walls. Line drawings record each piece’s layering and individual craggy shape. Ranked clipboards full of computer drawings enumerate further details. The taxonomy is painstaking, ridiculous: it foregrounds process. Layering up these works takes time: typically a day per coat, of which there may be hundreds. A visit to Wealleans’ studio reveals a roomful of objects covered in that day’s colour, a kind of charcoal grey. By inserting his work into the extended scale of geological time, Wealleans emphasizes the duration embedded in their surfaces: they record their own histories.

The picture plane often gets treated as mysterious landscape, an adventure playground. Layered chunks of paint emerge from the works’ surfaces like weathered rock formations. Wealleans describes the complexities of finding the forms and motifs embedded within the works, the difficulty of imagining his surfaces in reverse, building up layers of paint to excavate later on. Rocococococo (2004) bulges with forms, some resembling garlands of eyeballs, one volcano-like, and all bedded out like a garden in bloom. Paintings and sculptures are often adorned with Wilma Flintstone-style beads made from lumps of paint or faceted gems gummed together out of left-over skins from the bottom of pails. The ironically precious strands connect forms, looping out of the picture plane, or dangling loosely from sculptures. Glossy, lumpy ceramics from the show In the Shadow of the Beast bear strings of beads and paint chips threading in and out of holes and prongs, like dressing-table trinkets from another planet.

There is a formal curiosity driving the work, pleasure in making paint behave in spooky and unaccustomed ways. Wealleans has a clear fascination with his material, remarking: “I think a painting is the hardest thing to look at”. His imagined rituals and willful misrecognitions seem generated out of desire to conceive and construct things on the edge of the unknown. This search for objects on the border of unrecognisablility is perhaps one motivation for Wealleans’ reappropriation of the tribal objects repurposed by the colonial imagination. Part of the lure and the fascination of these artifacts are their formal qualities. They are objects made in entirely new ways, objects based on entirely different sets of premises and fashioned with alien expertise. Science fiction too participates in this politic of exoticism, discovery and conquest, but its fascination lies in this desire for estrangement, in its attempts to imagine and describe cultures and creatures constructed according to a completely different set of assumptions. It’s not easy to talk about Weallean’s work for the same reason it evokes a genuine wonder at the possibilities of painting. His works are aliens from the planet of paint.

First published in Eyeline Issue 65, Summer 2007/8

…faithful to my habits as a philosopher of science, I tried to consider images without attempting personal interpretation.  Little by little, this method, which has in its favour scientific prudence, seemed to me to be an insufficient basis on which to found a metaphysics of the imagination… Only phenomenology – that is to say, consideration of the onset of the image in an individual consciousness – can help us to restore the subjectivity of images and to measure their fullness, their strength and their transsubjectivity.
Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space

I’ve been having trouble with my eyes lately.  Nothing serious, but experts have been peering through my lenses, systematically dazzling me.  It all started with dark spots – tiny moving shadows flicking across the white page, the glowing screen, the blue sky.

So I put my head in the brace and direct my gaze where instructed while painfully bright tracers from the doctor’s examination lamp skip across my vision, while my eye tries to focus on the beams bouncing in unaccustomed ways across its inner surface.  Then drops dilating my pupils (for the easy perusal of my retinas). Sitting again in the diffuse sunshine of the waiting room, I’m seeing with all the spectral haze and failing focus of an organ that’s been anaesthetised.

To look at and with the eye, rather than through it, to experience its viscous form, its artifacts and failures, its lodging in a body, is a key part of Ann Veronica Janssens’ practice. The co-incidence of my opthalmalogical episode and my first experience of Janssens’ work made me approach her installation at Artspace as something like that physical examination: me peering in at myself peering out.

Accounts of her art often describe encounters with spaces of her design.  Mieke Bal, in particular, is nervous about this approach: she tells her story of passage into a foggy room, then casts it into question, then tells another story about another work. But this consideration of the individual, embodied encounter somehow seems the only way.  Photographs flatten, theoretical approaches hedge.  Perhaps a diagram would do it? Narrative seems to be such a narrow slice through the experience, one of so many forking paths.  This is the vexed, and also the beautiful, thing about ephemeral, spatialised practices: how to communicate them?

Entering the gallery stairwell a voice bounces off the walls – a NASA scientist speaking of the Cassini spacecraft’s passage through the rings of Saturn: “Although the ring gaps appeared empty, they weren’t. Innumerable bits of ring dust were waiting for Cassini… Each time a dust particle hit Cassini the impact produced a puff of plasma, a tiny cloud of ionised gas… there were as many as 680 puffs a second.”  The narration is bracketed by recording of the tiny explosions, a bubbling of radio waves.

Puff. A little word for a minute explosion of plasma, of ionised gas, of rock and metal vapourising. The product of planetary specks – the size of particles in cigarette smoke, according to the narrator – meeting a larger, more purposive interplanetary speck.  The work raises the issue of scale, of emptiness that isn’t, and raises the curtain on Janssens’ ideas of moments that are ‘monumental, but at the same time nothing’.

Aren’t we all made of spacedust?

Puff has an affinity with Soufflés, a 1995 sound piece made for an old tobacco warehouse in Dunkirk. Sighs echo around the large building.  These exhalations are more intimate and embodied than the quantised, fractured digital fizzing of the puffs.  Wordless, yet communicative, the sighing warehouse recalls the original purpose of the building, the exhalation that the cigarette fog makes visible. The dramatisation of breath is part of the paradox that lends smoking its power, making public the in- and ex-halations that keep us alive, all the while poisoning the organ responsible.

Space research is utopian, but entwined in a vast military-industrial complex. The Cassini project itself is a joint venture between NASA, the European and the Italian Space Agencies. Astronomy provides a different baseline for our imagining.  It is almost impossible to conceive of galaxies turning, to picture the vastness of space, and cook dinner, or walk across a room, but this familiar immensity is part of the astronomer’s everyday.

The tale of Cassini’s passage through the rings of Saturn is a reminder of interplanetary space as something traversable, something other than the black dome of night above us, dead stars shining.  There’s a beautiful hubris in those small spacecraft, sent off on journeys that take decades or centuries to complete. Out beyond the edge of the solar system, Voyager, the most distant human object, still sends back its attenuated stream of data.

Janssens’ 2004 exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Marseille was named 8’23”.  It takes eight minutes and twenty-three seconds for the light emitted by the sun to reach earth.  At this scale light has duration, a thickness. Think too of that other famous duration – longer than a pop song, shorter than a coffee break – John Cage’s 4 minutes and 33 seconds of silence.  Or rather, of a pianist sitting at the keyboard, and an auditorium full of rustlings, coughing and murmurs. This intervention had a theatricality, but pointed outwards, to the space surrounding the performer.

There is a similar understated theatricality to Janssen’s installations.  As she describes it: “I make a set, but then I have no control over what happens – nobody does.” The work is set in motion by the artist, tended, watered and maintained by the gallery staff, who turn the lights on and feed the fog machine its syrupy mix.  To build her situations, Janssens uses scientific data and the rarefied products of research and development, along with repurposed everyday technologies – lights from discos and movie sets, coloured gels, smoke machines.

After climbing the Artspace stairs through the reverberating digital burbles of Saturn’s rings, there’s a sudden shift from the bright slanting light of early autumn to the darkened gallery.  A mist fills the space.  Two beams cross the large room, one white, one lemon yellow. Rectangular panes of light shine from theater spots mounted low in the corner opposite the door. The oblique patches they form on the walls are soft-edged from the fog and the distance across the room, prismatic at the edges.

Unlike Janssens’ previous indoor fog installations, which were dense roomfuls of coloured vapour, the fog does not completely obscure; it creates, rather, an atmosphere, a slight impediment.  It doesn’t solidify the space, but makes the movement of air and light visible, thickened slightly. When dense, the fog acts to disaggregate sensation.  The physical experience of space and the visual perception of it are unhinged.  A bright but blank room recalls the perceptual tricks of whiteout, where indirect daylight and snowy conditions can lead to deadly misapprehensions of scale and distance.

In Green White Study the beams shine across open space of Artspace’s main gallery, reflecting off the floor, moving, diverging and scattering. The light outlines the vortices of fog moving in the air currents. There is a slight, strange, chemical smell from the black box of the fog machine. Crossing the room to stand by the spots, I can feel the body of the lights radiating heat, like a live creature.

In a small room off the main gallery,  AX is a sunburst array of white light emitting diodes.  Designed for use in the film industry, this Ringlite ™ is a convenient, portable halo for mounting around a camera lens. Janssens has hung it on the wall; it casts a very pale violet glow across the room.

Iris-like in form, the bright white points of light live on the retina for many moments afterward – green, with a purple afterimage. These moving, swinging after-images make perceptible the flickering, restless journey of my eyes as they move over the dimmed gallery.  Although my brain smoothes my perception of my eyes’ saccadic hops around the space, the super-imposition of the lights’ dot-pattern shows the movement clearly; there’s a visible disparity between the lingering image on my retina, which drifts slowly, and my conscious vision, scanning the room, lingering on points of interest.

Janssens sculptural practice addresses this eye, with its organic peculiarities, an eye firmly lodged in a body. Most simply, a poster for the 1997 Istanbul Biennale, distributed in the city market, invited people to gently press into their closed eyelids, evoking the sparkling, grainy and swarming closed-eye movies of phosphenes.

My eye, then, inspiralling, frictioning style-wise, being instrument for striking sparks, is bequeathed visions at every illumination it’s struck to create.
Stan Brackhage, Metaphors On Vision

Medieval explanations of vision had beams shooting out of the pupils, penetrating spaces and outlining objects like robot laser eyes. More contemporary understanding of sight describes the necessity of movement, of sensitivity to change, and the converse invisibility of that which is immobile and unchanging.  Then there’s the difference between the fovea, the small area of sharply focused colour vision, and the less colour perceptive, more light and motion sensitive peripheral vision.

Experimental filmmaker Stan Brakhage emphasized the vast range of visual experience through manipulating film stocks, painting and collaging directly onto film and disrupting the framed-up stylings of the mainstream Hollywood tradition.  He emphasised the chasm between the camera eye and the eye of the human viewer.  Similarly, Janssens insertions and, in the case of the fog installations, deletions, question both our normative seeing and our embodied way of experiencing spaces.

Ciel (2003) is a projection of slowly shifting images of the sky, relayed from a video camera mounted on the roof. The image fills the end wall of Artspace’s long gallery.  Janssen originally made the work for the Brussels offices of Belgacom, Belgium’s largest telecommunications corporation.  The remote camera was located on a sky-bridge between two office towers, an elevated passage for executives only.  The work brought this elevated perspective down to earth, a projection in the foyer making the aerial view from the top of the office tower available to the 8000 workers in the complex. In its original corporate environment, the work slyly offers the usual panacea that is foyer sculpture:  artworks mollifying the glinting threshold of the corporation.

Does the sky look different from 30 stories up?  Ciel (French for sky, or heaven) offers a literal view of the airspace, a moving picture of the sky just above the horizon, full of invisible transmissions, a shot of the operative space of wireless communications.  The executive cloud-view could be a metaphor for commercialisation of the ether, the transmission parcels and satellite links that make up an indispensable part of the network operated by the corporation.

In the work’s installation at Artspace, the weather is once more brought indoors. Again, the work provides a view from a restricted zone (in this case the gallery roof) of a shared airspace. Today the sky is blue with white clouds, some plump, some vague, all vaporous, an almost archetypal sky.  Janssens describes the altered specificity of the work in Aotearoa, land of the long white cloud, and in Auckland, a city of inconstant weather and quickly shifting light.

Framing a patch of sky in landscape format, in the standard video aspect ratio of 4 by 3, the projection is mirrored by the shiny floor of the gallery, like a reflecting pool. The cloud-wall disrupts the architecture, cutting a view into the windowless gallery the same way the curtain glass of an office tower might.

The space is hushed, filled only with the steps of visitors moving through the gallery, the noise of the fan in the projector and the occasional eruptions of the fog machine.  The stillness emphasises the sounds of traffic moving outside the dark quiet space of the gallery.

The city is the indispensable context of collage and of the gallery space. Modern art needs the sound of traffic outside to authenticate it.
Brian O’Doherty, Inside the White Cube

Like the rustling audience of Cage’s piano piece, the urban hum beyond the walls is the setting and also in some ways the subject of the installation.  One of Janssens earlier fog pieces made this necessary urbanity more explicit by piping in slightly amplified sounds from the surrounding city.

Other works operate beyond the gallery.  Super Space, a series of 13 projects for Utrecht, made in 1999, operated in public and private spaces within that city  – from a change-filled pocket, to a pedestrian underpass, to a walled garden. As the artist declared her intentions: “Super Space emphasizes the experience of both the macro and the micro cosmos, of the space surrounding the space as well as the space within that space.”

One of these projects, Agoraphobia, provided large hand-held mirrors to visitors to St Willibrorders Church.  The mirrors enabled visitors to look down into the reflection of the soaring roof – a disorienting switch of perspective revealing the highly crafted psychological space of the church. Another in the series consisted of flexible liquid crystal panels flung around a garden.  The panels changed colour in response to shifts in heat, showing rainbow shadows, transforming infra-red radiation into the visible.  The heat shadows resembled oil patches, rainbows on the wet road.  Another intervention supplied placemats to the Festival Pavilion restaurant.  The mats were adorned with images of the electromagnetic fields surrounding fingerprints, little aura photographs accompanied by the legend ‘Your body doesn’t have clear borders.’

Horror Vacui, part of the artist’s contribution to the 1999 Venice Biennale took a thousand 100 Lire coins, machining off one side, leaving a shiny disc with the shallow concentric marks of the erasure.  The coins were then put into circulation.  In transforming the coins into artwork, Janssens invalidated them as calibrated tokens of exchange, making them worth both more and less.

At Artspace, the mediated sky of Ciel moves by invisible increments – stare at it and the changes are almost imperceptible, look away and back again (get into a conversation, perhaps), and the picture has changed completely. Technology frames and relays the image, transforming sunlight and water vapour into electrical impulses and light, atmosphere into information. The image is slightly noisy – there’s a little dither in the darker blue at the top of the frame, and the scan lines of the camera are clearly visible. There is a necessary delay built into the image, the hesitation between the sunlight falling on the charge coupled device of the camera-eye, the resulting electrical impulses traveling down a wire, transforming again into a beam of light, which is modulated by a liquid crystal array and focused onto the gallery wall. The light reflects off the white surface and into the eye of the viewer, from whence it is once again transformed into minute electrical impulses in the wet matter of the brain.

Weather is a commonplace, a safe topic of conversation. We are immersed in it, but still dote on its representations on the TV news. Airborne water is amenable to our imaginings, as well as meteorological categorisation. We can form clouds into representations.  Nam June Paik, in his 1984 text, ‘Art and Satellite’ ’quotes Thoreau, that promoter of American wilderness, “The telephone company is trying to connect Maine and Tennessee by telephone.  Even if it were to succeed, though, what would the people say to each other?  What could they possibly find to talk about?”.  Thoreau is baffled as to what interlocutors from different parts of the country might have to discuss.  But of course, as well as those functional telephonic exchanges, they will speak about the weather.  Paik continues: “Satellite art… must consider how to achieve a two-way connection between opposite sides of the earth; how to give a conversational structure to the art; how to master differences in time; how to play with improvisation, in-determinism, echoes, feedbacks, and empty spaces in the Cagean sense”…

An invention surely as world-changing in its time as telephones and satellites have been in ours, mirrors recur in Janssens work – laid on floors to reflect a painted ceiling, carried by visitors to a church, made from bus wheels and small change. Mirrors invert the familiar and throw light in unexpected places. In Nam June Paik’s 1974 work, TV Buddha, an antique bronze statue watches its own image on a television, a picture relayed via closed circuit by a video camera positioned behind the TV.  In Paik’s work, the Buddha gazes upon its own image in the very recent past. There is a loop, a slowing of time. The work is a meditative machine, reflecting eternally (as long as it’s switched on) back on itself. It is a technological mirror.

The image of the sky in Ciel is slippery, mirror-like.  It is transporting, a model of surveillance and an architectural device.  It mimics the doubling of space that mystified Thoreau, but which is now so familiar. Long-range conversation and vision at a distance are commonplaces of our telematic lives.  Surveillance cameras, video calling, web cams, all enable the co-existence of spaces within one another – the security footage of gallery entrance relayed to the gallery office, the slow-refreshing web cam image of the retreating tide on my computer desktop, the view from the roof.  Our days are studded with little reflections and loops of time and space, but the strangeness of it often escapes us.

A mirror inverts space, fog thickens it. Telecommunications saturate our consciousness, but there’s still that eerie delay when talking to friends on the other side of the world, the lag that speaks most eloquently about the vast distances between here and there. Ann Veronica Janssens’ work disrupts the everyday just enough to make these commonplaces new again. She uses the poetry of science, the ordinary magic of technology to clear a space, to make visible the slowness of light and the embodiment of colour.

1. Gaston Bachelard , The Poetics of Space, translated by John R Stilgoe, Beacon Press, Boston, 1992. p.xix
2. The artist, in conversation with the author, March 2006
3. William C. Wees, Light Moving in Time: Studies in the Visual Aesthetics of Avant-Garde Film, University of California Press, Berkley, 1992, p.93
4, Brian O’Doherty, Inside the White Cube: the Ideology of the Gallery Space, University of California Press, Berkeley, 1999. p.44
5. Artist’s Statement in Laurent Jacob (ed) Ann Veronica Janssens: A Different Image in Each Eye, La Lettre volée/ Espace 251 Nord, Brussels, 1999, p.120
6. Nam June Paik, “Art and Satellite” (1984) in Randall Packer and Ken Jordan (eds.) Multimedia: from Wagner to Virtual Reality, W.W. Norton and Company, New York, 2001, p.42

In 1954 American radiologist D. Howry and his team created live ultrasound images using declassified material from the gun turret of a B29 Superfortress – planes which, at the close of the Second World War would leave Pacific Island airfields in their hundreds to bomb the Japanese mainland. Reviving a technique of early experimental ultrasound, which required the patient to be immersed in water, Brennan forms images exploring the interface between war, technology and perception. South Pacific recalls stories of tropical lagoons littered with rusting ordnance and coral islands flattened for runways. A vast ocean is glimpsed by radar, video and ultrasound.

Single channel video, stereo sound, 10 minutes (2007)

Premiered: Auckland International Film Festival 2007
Exhibited in: The Fifth Bangkok Experimental Film Festival, 2008
South Pacific,  Two Rooms, Auckland, 2008
Cloudland, The Substation Singapore, 2008
The Liverpool Biennial, 2008
Feedforward: The Angel of History, LaBoral, Spain, 2009

About this work:
Video interview for FactTV
Essay by curator Rachel O’Reilly