DEAD MEDIA (2010) RETURN TO ART MENU

A site-specific solo exhibition which was part of the main programme for the National Arts Festival 2010 and installed in the Dr Hewitt Gallery at the Albany Natural Science Museum.

The site ordinarily functions as an old-fashioned educational display and its layout is reminiscent of a colonial curiosity cabinet with samples, mementos, and stuffed animals which represent a far too broad (yet selectively limited) glance at natural science, biology and anthropology all crammed into one room.

For Dead Media, the room was darkened, and a series of videos, sound and lightboxes in the shape of specimen jars were added to the display. The content of these were a combination of metaphoric representations of abstract concepts and digitally altered live things in motion – trees in a breeze, a bloated decaying rat covered in flies.  A subtext runs through these additions in that they imply a narrative of a world completely lost in which the ‘collection’ contains the last remaining examples: something akin to a time capsule.

These light-emitting, moving interventions may seem more closely related to ‘the real’ than the stuffed animals and desiccated seed pods which were now in shadow. Yet because they are digitally manipulated, virtual with no tangible worldly substance, the digital media is more dead (in that it has never truly lived) than the samples selected by the room’s original, long-dead curator.