Merilyn Fairskye
“In recent years I have been making artworks using photomedia, video and installation, sometimes all at the same time, to explore the contemporary experience of a hyper-connected world where physical and geographic boundaries dissolve.
Connected (2002-2003) is a multi-versioned digital video/installation about the shadows cast on Alice Springs by the long-term presence of Pine Gap, the secretive joint US/Australian spy facility that connects Central Australia to the world. It is accompanied by a series of life-sized photographic transparencies depicting anonymous business people captured in the city at the end of the working day, immersed in mobile phone conversations.
My most recent work, Stati d'Animo, tracks anonymous travellers as they pass through international airports in a series of still images, a three-channel silent video installation (2005), and an extended video essay shot and edited on HDV (2006). I use the word videograph to describe the formation of both the still and moving images in this work, which suggests something different from both film and photography. The videographs condense and dilate the experience of time, by superimposing a sequence of frames in calibrated transparent layers. The research and development stage of each body of work, both conceptually and technically, is initially quite intuitive, and wide-reaching, and gives me an archive from which I create a range of more focused works.”
(Merilyn Fairskye 2006)
