Castlemaine Art Museum
24 March – 3 September 2023
This new work, Air to Atmosphere, commissioned for the Castlemaine Art Museum (CAM), came about through a conversation with CAM director Naomi Cass after she saw my video and photographic series Being Ourselves (2020) at Monash Gallery of Art. Naomi was interested in how that project had engaged with the local community and wanted to work with artists who could meaningfully connect and collaborate with people in and around Castlemaine.
Air to Atmosphere includes a video installation and photographic portraits of people from the LGBTQIA+ community in Dja Dja Wurrung Country in central regional Victoria. In the video participants go about their everyday lives, talk to camera, and perform choreographed movements devised by Jo Lloyd to a song written by local music collective &so, shot on the streets of Castlemaine. During the exhibition there will also be a series of live performances by the participants in the gallery at CAM.
As a tangible record of the project, this microsite along with the Air to Atmosphere book reflects its multi-layered approach, providing a range of entry points to explore LGBTQIA+ experience and identity – visual, textual, poetic, temporal and lyrical. Anne Marsh’s essay contextualises Air to Atmosphere within my broader practice from an art historical and theoretical perspective. The interview excerpts come from a series of audio and video discussions with individuals and couples whose observations and stories were integral to the whole project. Terence Jaensch’s five sonnets connect to the many themes explored, such as: recent politics impacting LGBTQIA+ lives, the effect of queer representation in art and cinema, the experience of being silent about one’s sexuality during adolescence, coming out within a potentially threatening environment, and the legacy of specific queer histories. Lyrics from &so’s original song Deep Kissing Under Siege were drawn from the participants’ interviews, reflecting the cross-pollination that occurred throughout the project. The photographic portraits of the participants document a collaboration between the subjects and me via the camera. These are presented alongside the interview excerpts to represent different aspects of each participant’s identity, thoughts, opinions and selves.
Working on the project provided opportunities to develop new methodologies within my practice. Much of my previous video and performance work has been developed from material derived from participants’ personal experiences and memories, but in the past I treated this material as developmental research, shifting it from its original source and abstracting the content to blur subject positions and distinctions between self and other. Air to Atmosphere employs a different approach. It draws from documentary methodology to keep the subject’s stories connected to their authors for a more direct representation of their lives and experiences. It candidly reflects their thoughts relating to gender, sexuality, community and the impacts of language. For this project I have also incorporated song into my practice for the first time – influenced in part by the language of cinema musicals and music video.
The creative process for Air to Atmosphere was consultative and collaborative. In the first instance I met with all potential participants to discuss the project and we made a mutual decision whether a collaboration would be meaningful and productive for the work and for each other. I then interviewed each of the participants, presenting initial ideas as prompts for discussion about how they wanted to be represented in the work. A choreographic creative development workshop for the performance took place in Castlemaine with choreographer Jo Lloyd and the ‘cast’ to devise solo and group sequences that embodied the participants’ experiences through the abstract language of dance. As in many of my earlier works, choreography is used to suggest a form of bodily communication and feeling that exists outside of everyday speech and language. In Air to Atmosphere, it also becomes a means to avoid reductive representations of the LGBTQIA+ community.
Air to Atmosphere aims to explore the diversity, trauma, resilience and pride of the local LGBTQIA+ community, encouraging dialogue with audiences and promoting LGBTQIA+ visibility, rights and equality. As an artist living in Melbourne, I didn’t have first-hand understanding of the LGBTQIA+ community in regional Victoria, but I hope that the project reveals what I have learnt through working with the local participants, all of whom have generously contributed to the making of the work.
Through photography, moving image, song, poetry, choreographed movement, interviews and performance Air to Atmosphere shows that identity, experience and community are always multi-faceted and shifting. This microsite book is not just an accompaniment to the exhibition, but a standalone experience and archive that provides a range of perspectives about how it feels to be who we are in the place we live.
– David Rosetzky