Always Almost But Not Quite.
Brenton Alexander Smith |
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Access start 29 / 04 / 2020 6pm - Access end 10 / 05 / 2020 9pm.
Always Almost But Not Quite, will eventually be an exhibition of video sculpture at Kudos Gallery. Due to the Covid19 pandemic the gallery is temporarily closed. I managed to set up and document a mock exhibition in Black Box, on the UNSWAD campus, the day before the campus shut down. My studio is also on campus, where these sculptures are presently entombed.
The works in the show aim to elicit feelings of sympathy, perhaps entangled with revulsion, to the detritus of car wrecks. The sculptural forms are made from wiring looms obtained from within car wrecks. They represent the internal workings of a car - inverted: a fragile interior spilling out.
Human figures are absent here, yet there is a peculiar sense of the anthropomorphic in both the sculptural forms and the entities that move across the screens enshrined within them. The forms on the screens were made by subverting the intended use of the driving game, BeamNG.drive. By pushing the system in ways never intended, the videogame becomes a platform for creating time-based artworks where the car – its purpose and its movements – becomes something other. It is in this other space that something more-than-car emerges: entities I refer to as crashforms.
The crashforms have the potential to elicit affective responses through their strange movements. Attempts to categorise a crashform often result in a collection of not-quites; their erratic behaviours evoke human or animal qualities, but these perceptions often last only a moment before the crashforms recombine into something else.
