Electro (2003)
Single Channel : Stereo
In a suburban kitchen, in the small hours of the morning, a man encounters a shimmering ‘double’ of himself as he wanders from bedroom to bathroom. The man overcomes his initial fear and tries to communicate before attempting unification with his doppelganger, triggering a climax that leaves the viewer unsure of the outcome: death, transcendence or a simple blown light bulb.
I have always been interested the elasticity of screen and story space. This has been achieved via the employment of a variety of self-reflexive and auto-narrative devices within my video work. Electro extends these ideas by employing cinematic language and the device of the doppelganger, calling up such references as Brian DePalma’s Body Double, David Cronenberg’s Dead Ringers, and John Carpenter’s Starman but extending back to lovers of the double from Hitchcock to Edgar Allan Poe.
This was an important work for me for two primary reasons: it was the first of the genuinely expressionistic works after completing art school; and it was the first of the ‘double’ works in which I began to work with splitting and doubling as means of constructing the self as ‘other’ through screen technology. Electro was one of three works I created for the Parallel exchange exhibition involving Australian and Korean artists that took place in Melbourne and Seoul during 2003. The work has also been shown in a number of contexts around Europe as part of the touring show Old Habits Die Hard as well as Situation at Sydney’s Museum of Contemporary Art and screening programs in the U.S.