Terrain
Vague, 2003
Bus, Blue screen, video projection, sound - Click
here to view the video
Exhibition: Stopover. 50thVenice Biennale 2003
Graham gussin has created a multi-faceted installation in which
several independent elements collide to address issues of tourism,
time, locality and utopias. Central to the work is a journey
the artist made from London to Venice in a 1980’s passenger
coach that has then been transported to the interior of the
convent. This ultimate symbol of mass tourism, normally hidden
on the edges of Venice, is brought inside the city. The coach
is from a period that Gussin identifies as the closing of 'the
decade of love and freedom', and now serves as a nostalgic reminder
of hoped for utopias. Central to Gussin's work is an exploration
of the point where time, distance, reality and imagination collide
and the physical presence of the coach is countered by other
works which refer to other places, other time and other realities.
A specially commissioned sound-work playing from the coach consists
of road movie soundtracks re-scored in reverse, so introducing
temporal travel to the notion of physical travel. The floor
of the space has been replaced by a chroma-key blue floor that
can simultaneously be "anywhere and nowhere".
David Thorpe and Sarah Glennie |
