John Conomos

Leftquote We were put on earth to make things. Rightquote
W.H.Auden
Video Logic, MCA, Sydney
Sunday, August 3rd, 2008

Autumn Song – Take 2 at the MCA, 19th August – 2nd November 2008. Free entry. 

Video Logic features new and recent work by six artists who have been
involved with video and screen-based artwork for a decade or more.
Curated by Russell Storer, the featured artists are Denis Beaubois,
Philip Brophy, John Conomos, Adam Geczy, John Gillies and Eugenia
Raskopoulos.

 

Autumn Song – Take 2 | 2008 | 39min | Beta & 4 X Neon

” In my contribution to the “Video Logic” group exhibition my new video and neon installation “Autumn Song – Take Two ” (2008) concerns with contextualising my previous video essay “Autumn Song” in terms of the various artistic, cinematic and literary representations of the Greek island of Kythera. The reputed ‘utopian’ island of the birth of Aphrodite.

The four blue neon signs represent various representations of Kythera by the Poet’s Charles Baudelaire and George Seferis, the painter Watteau and the modernist Greek filmmaker Theo Angelopoulos. The colour of the neon’s represent the Mediterranean Sea: that veritable hypnotic and legendary sea of criss-crossing hybrid cultures, histories and exilic migrancy.

And, of course, I was born virtually underneath a neon sign at my childhood Tempe milk bar in the 1950s.”

An exhibition catalogue is available in the MCA Store. More information at the MCA’s website