We've Got a Love Like Electric Sound*

Seventh Gallery, Fitzroy. April 2009

Artists:

Catherine Connolly, Candice Cranmer, Stephen Palmer, Carl Scrase, Sally Tape & Fiona Williams

Curator: Catherine Connolly

Artwork on poster: Sally Tape

*Title of exhibition taken from Suedes' 'Electricity'

I’d never seen or heard anything so clearly made for me*

2008. Timber, Enamel, Screen. Video 1 minute loop.

Installation shot, as presented in 'We've Got a Love like Electric Sound'**, Seventh Gallery, Fitzroy, Melbourne, 2008

Detail

In this short, looped video crowd footage has been selected from an early 80’s The Jam concert, and slowed down to a rhythmic pace focussing on the pulsatory motion of the amorous crowd juxtaposed with the intent, almost shocking stillness of a photographer amongst them. The crowd thrusts together in wave like unity, all intent on an unseen spectacle before them while the photographer remains still, camera posed and almost predatory. As the crowd continues in this manner there are moments in the film where you are unsure if it is adulation or protest manifest in their actions. Throughout their hectic motion, slow enough that the drive and energy is readable but to emphasise the gesture as a collective one, the photographer remains static. There is a desire and a need in his pose to document and possess the occasion, as much to verify the performer’s presence as his own in theirs. There is a contrast felt between the private meaning of such an interaction and the public nature in which it is played out.

* Title of artwork from Peter York on Roxy Music’s first Album, Frieze Magazine, Issue 113, March 2008

**Title of exhibition taken from Suede's

'Electricity'

Nothing matters now, nothing matters, and nothing matters, O yeah!*

Nothing matters now, nothing matters, and nothing matters, O yeah!*
2008. Timber, enamel paint, screen. Digital Video. One minute loop

Installation Shot as seen in

'We've Got a Love like Electric Sound'**

with Sally Tape's vinyl piece:

New, New Artwork (hell, yes!)'Which may be why the best love affairs are electronic, foreign or architectural'***

Detail of video screen

Similarly in this work, footage has been selected from a 1982 The Jam concert, though this time a live studio performance. In this selection a group of adolescent boys fill the screen with in sweeping post-punk and pre-mosh dance motions, slowed down into a mesmerizing mash of colour, energy and movement. The boys move and interact with such intensity and motion, at one moment quite beautiful and at another threatening, that the work is at some times expressive of the joy of such a tumultuous physical expression of musical interpretation and unity of experience, and at others a very masculine space that could as easily be read as a scene of violence as a scene of dance or pleasure. Again ideas of collective actions are explored, in particular the behaviour induced by fans relationships to music, performers and with each other.

*Title from Franz Ferdinand, ‘Michael’

**Title of exhibition taken from Suede's 'Electricity'

*** Irene Cheng, "New, New Museum" frieze issue 111, Nov-Dec 2007