I’ve Come a Long Way (2007)
4 screen installation : Surround
Chulalongkorn Art Centre, Thailand
This installation was shown at the Chulalongkorn Art Centre in Bangkok and consisted of four synchronised video projections with a surround sound track. The projections were in two pairs comprising four sides of a square, one pair depicting myself crossing Lake Tyrell, Victoria’s largest salt lake, and the other showing crowds at Bangkok's weekend market. The salt lake footage showed a spare and barren Wimmera landscape divided between the pink-brown of the lake and the bright, clear inland sky. I slowly, almost imperceptibly appeared out of this landscape walking towards the camera.
At the point at which my body completely filled and blackened the frame I then appeared on the opposite screen, firstly with my body filling the frame and then walking away into the distance. For the audience I appeared to cross the space between the screens, momentarily blackening both, as though the gallery occupied a non-space between these two halves of the landscape. This experience was accentuated by the use of the surround track that enabled me to create the effect of my footsteps crossing the space from one side to the other, seemingly walking ‘through’ the audience.
Perpendicular to these screens were another pair containing images of the large crowds that attend Bangkok's Chatuchak market. At about one minute prior to the point where my image crossed between the salt lake screens, the crowd stopped walking and stood about shuffling until just after I crossed over, as though signalling or acknowledging the moment.