The Approach: : Single channel video work with sound

Abstract

The Approach is one of a series of moving image works reflecting humanity’s relationship to hostile or oppressive environments, while exploring the liminal narrative of unresolved events. It forms part of an extended interest in the notion of suspended trauma - the effect of a continuous retelling of dramatic/traumatic events through shared narratives particularly via mass media, displaced in time and place. Under the research project of the same title, this body of work questions the potential of ‘retelling’ to create, what Lacan terms ‘a missed encounter with the real’ where the ‘real’ becomes the lost object obscured behind layers of representation. In The Approach, the physical degeneration of the actual environment is in transition between living and dying, whilst the filmic journey traverses the space between explanation and denouement. The Approach was first shown as part of Moving Time: Video Art at 50, 1965–2015, at the Eli and Edythe Broad Art Museum, USA. This major survey exhibition explores the development of video art from its earliest presentation to the present day. Taking over two floors of the museum's Zaha Hadid designed building, the exhibition traces the impact various artists have had on the art form—from its birth in the 1960s with artists Andy Warhol and Nam June Paik, to the performative work of influential women artists such as Joan Jonas, to the rarely-seen work of international artists continuing to push the media forward today. Moving Time is one of the final exhibitions conceived by Michael Rush—the museum’s founding director who was internationally recognized for his observations on video art and authorship of a pioneering survey on the subject, Video Art, published by Thames and Hudson. Moving Time: Video Art at 50, toured to two other venues: - CAFA Art Museum, Beijing, China, 2016 - Redtory Museum of Contemporary Art, Guangzhou, China, 2016