RESONANT ACTIONS | RAY HARRIS, KATE MURPHY, KATE MITCHELL

About

CACSA Project 11 RESONANT ACTIONS acknowledges three performative video artists at varying stages of their careers and recognises the ways that their critical, provocative, unexpected and illuminating contributions have reshaped, and continue to shape, the landscape of contemporary art—specifically how performance was (and is) interconnected with society more widely: its potency and immediacy allowing artists to comment powerfully on social and gender issues. These artists have fused comments on everyday life, creating actions and performances that respond to and are fuelled by accessing and appraising a spectrum of emotions—and complemented with insights into the medical, political and economic frameworks that have evolved to manage the anxieties and issues that resonate in contemporary society. The artists are significant talents in understanding the changing role and shape of contemporary performance art and video practice in the Australian contemporary art landscape.

Kate Murphy’s video practice examines the interplay between portraiture and the various forms and traditions of documentary including film and TV documentary, reality TV and home video. Through her single and multi-channel video installations she explores a multiplicity of viewpoints; that of the subject, the camera, the observer, the viewer, and continues to explore how these unfold in video portraiture.

Kate Mitchell’s practice includes performance-based videos, projections and objects, drawings and conceptual offerings. Her work has consistently played with the joke and the cartooning of violence. Across many videos she performs the Disneyland impossible: cutting a hole around yourself with a saw; walking on a barrel; climbing a ladder while cutting rungs. Her performances are magical to watch, shocking and brave. Mitchell works on the limit of the acceptable and normal. She finds the irrational in life in order to reflexively question herself, her material reality, and her place within a society in which we all constantly perform.
Currently, Ray Harris’ focus is on the compulsion of everyday delusional or fantasy states, as a means to direct the uncontainable hunger of the void, fill what is missing or repair the unrepairable, and manage repressed desires, anxieties, and emotional wounds. She explores these issues through subjective interpretations of universal conditions, creating installations and self-performed videos. The associated bodies of work represent the two often oppositional but fundamental aspects of a person’s mental functioning and identity, their inner thought and outer behaviour.

- See more at: http://www.cacsa.org.au/?page_id=3178#sthash.zfEvjplV.dpuf