Drone on

This work was an experiment in crude video/sound collage, based upon the surveillance of nature as a metaphor for our contemporary world. The work incorporates four separate sources of materials: night vision photography provided by NITD I, bees imagery, Australian bird calls, particularly owls, from archival sources and some basic electronic drone sounds made by the artist's 14 year old son.

The anarchic and unsettling quality was desired and inspired by the image of a wasp dragging a bee in conjunction with the already otherworldly quality of the kangaroo images from the NITD I pool. Confusion, incoherency, dread, the everyday sublime - all come into play. Layering these images in an analog way, they start to enquiry about order, reason, as well as the state of control. Ending abruptly, this work also resists the conventional filmic order of a beginning, narrative and end as though someone had cut the film, and time stops.

Stephen Turpie is a painter with an interest in the use of symbols derived from the real world of street signs and scientific imagery and how the way we observe reality locates ourselves in place and in time. Painting assemblage, time based actions and often the random collage effect are used to subvert the predictable.