Mesmeric energy: Nebula and Slipstream
Professor Stephi Hemelryk Donald, Head of School of Communications, University of Technology Sydney
There is a shared mesmeric energy within and across the two works in Recontemporary.
Nebula takes a journey that is by turns tremulous and confident, operatic in its vision and yet deeply quiet in its tone. A momentary darkness, and then the body of Nebula moves us into fabulous glowing spaces that are mysterious but potentially legible. The potential rests in our capacity to submit to shape and suggestion. Is this a sleeting cumulus of snow in which we float? Is this a forest hovering above our heads where there is no sky but what the canopy affords? Where did this storm erupt and why has its power so reduced us? The voiceover talks us through a journey from adult bravado to acquiescence of our necessary embodiment through the earth’s contingencies.
Del Favero’s actor has a subtle and insistent voice that perfectly emanates fear and courage and wonder, a child who is no longer a child but who nonetheless retains the capacity to feel energy like a child. She, a voice that soon becomes our own, enunciates these places, these patterns, this all-encompassing weather, these feelings evoked by loneliness, this strength, this submission, and then, this absolute awe. The voice inside Nebula speaks directly to its the glowing restless topography of her dream, and states, without rancour, that her choice doesn’t really matter, ‘does it’? I think we do matter, (don’t we?), but the only in an awed, fragile and imploded sense. We/she are matter within the topographies of mountain, valley and riverbed, soaring trees, with all that is seen and named rising before and around us; bubbles of manifesting form.
Between each of three sequences, or ‘chapters’, there is an interactive intermission, where the viewer prompts the death and regeneration of time by gathering racing splinters of dust into a perfect orb. Thus shepherded, granules of light chase across the screen to recompose the dying-birthing star, the Nebula. We learn with our fingertips that the persistent pulsing globe will hover for a moment of comforting completion, and then retreat, and then return.
Slipstream is likewise flowing, amorphous, and poignant. The Slipstream triptych presents an extended moment in the urban activity of three populations: tourists, residents and tourism workers in St Mark’s Square in Venice, Londoners (maybe just a couple of tourists there too) at the top of the Oxford Street tube, and Hong Kongers in the shopping streets of Tsim Sha Tsui. Tourists show themselves by hovering a moment longer than the others, glancing up where the restless others move resolutely forward, or sideways. Some nonetheless stop to talk, to make a gesture to an acquaintance, to pull a friend in close for a hug. Each site is crowded but each population moves and clusters and negotiates its flow in its own way and its own time. The reference to _Nebula_’s particles of glowing dust streaming together, before turning and moving in another direction, is perfectly made. In Slipstream, however, we are invited to stare into each passing face and connect for a fraction of time with this beautiful human, or this one, or that. In St Mark’s Square a pair of young and achingly lovely people embrace. He nuzzles her hair and she nestles into his shoulder. But there are other, older couples too, ambulating the Square hand in hand, in their rain jackets. There is the lady rummaging in her bag for snacks as her husband (my guess work through their easy proximity) looks up at the architecture, or perhaps assesses the weather.
Every vignette charms as each new face veers past us, through us, and continues on, away or around. Here the orb we have interacted with in Nebula re-composes as explicitly human, and emotional. The camera (a handheld phone camera) is assumed by these weaving, mostly graceful, always intentional, crowds to be just another passer-by, no-one seems to register its attention. I wondered about this apparent indifference to the artist’s gaze, living intelligences are usually so aware of their peripheral sensory field. I must assume that they know somehow that this is always the Slipstream and that this is always the Nebula. We cannot escape, even if we wanted to, and if we did we would in any case be consumed and re-emerge in another slipstream and another implosion of dust very like the one we tried to leave. So, what then does it matter that some camera’s eye looks with such affection at us all from another centre of another slipstream just a step away?
‘It seems as though everything is dissolving into a single harmonious wave.’ Georg Buchner, Lenz
Stephi Hemelryk Donald 12.08.2023