Shaun_Gladwell

Shaun Gladwell “video is the new photography”- To Shaun Gladwell –“for me, these videos are like moving paintings. You can have them constantly playing on the wall as captured moments”. In this young artists works he displays his personal history, memory and contemporary cultural phenomena through performance, video, painting and sculpture. Australian contemporary artist Shaun Gladwell (born 1972) is a former skateboarding champion turned video and interactive artist. His video works, set in Sydney look at the life of the city in a different way. Gladwell see’s large cities as being too organised and functional. In his artwork, he tries to make the point that cities don’t have to be just for work. He does not want to live in a city that is to neat and organized, where skateboarding and graffiti are forbidden. Gladwell’s work takes skateboarding, which is often written off as time wasting or as belonging to an illegal youth culture, and presents it as a way of breathing life back into the city. Influenced by his experiences in Australia’s landscape of the outback, and Mad Max movies, the work is a suite of video’s accompanied by sound, photographic and sculptural works. Gladwell’s work critically engages personal history, memory and contemporary cultural phenomena through performance, video, painting and sculpture. Shaun finds poetry in popular culture. He is often the subject and the director or maker of his work. The actors or subjects in his videos include skateboard riders, break dancers, bike riders and material artists. Gladwell’s video’s focus on the beauty of their extraordinary physical strength and on the skill and of the visual tricks they perform. He uses devices such as slow motion and long takes to enhance the poetry of each movement and in the process he intensifies our appreciation of urban life. Artworks. blue and white linework composition. Gladwell often refers to the history of art in his video works. In blue and white linework composition 2008 he also references drawing and painting. Gladwell combines video footage of himself riding a bike and skateboarding along city streets. The camera is focused not on the actor but rather on the action- on the wheel of the bike and the deck of the skateboard as they trace the painted lines of city streets. Gladwell recreates the physical sensation of travelling along the city streets for the viewer. Strapped to Gladwell as he traces the road markings, the camera becomes the instrument- a type of paintbrush making and tracing a mark through the landscape. This act recalls Paul Klee’s famous description of drawing as the act of taking a line for a walk. The title of the work blue and white linework composition could be a title for painting. By choosing this title Gladwell draws our attention to his formal concerns and to the influences of art history. In blue and white linework composition, Gladwell uses white and yellow lines, 40 kilometer zone signs and bike symbols which are familiar to the travellers. The blue line from 2000 Sydney Olympic Marathon which is traced by the skater is less familiar. Prior to the Olympics the streets of Sydney were cleared. By skating within this space, Gladwell is reclaiming the street and championing the sport of skateboarding. Gladwell produced a number of important video works in 2000, including a precursor to this video called double linework. The tag painted on Gladwell’s skateboard, a sideways figure also known as Mr Eternity, who for over 30 years wrote the word ‘eternity’ in white chalk on footpaths across Sydney. Gladwell paid homage to Stace in his 2000 exhibition kickflipping flaneur and the skateboard with the urban individual who wanders the city, and idea proposed by nineteenth century poet and philosopher, Charles Baudelaire. The actors or subjects in Gladwell’s video’s, including the artist himself, could also be described as contemporary flaneur who kickflip, wheelie and dance across their environments, reclaiming public space. The bike rider Clad in black jeans, leather jacket and helmet and viewed always from behind, the motorcycle rider is ever in motion away from us. He remains anonymous no matter how long we spend in front of the screen.  The camera keeps a consistent tracking distance as the rider descends the outback highway, the slow-motion scrolling of the white road lines through the frame evoking a multitude of references from popular cinema, music and literature. The rider’s arms are outstretched, parallel to the horizon line that splits the video frame, a line formed where sky – on occasion vivid blue, other times tinged pink at dawn – meets the burnt red and grey mulga and saltbush scrubland of the plains stretched out before him, evoking the high horizon line used by twentieth-century Australian painters Sidney Nolan and in more pronounced manner Fred Williams to picture the vertiginous experience of encounter with such vast spaces.  Not unsurprisingly, given the quality of his own painting practice, Shaun Gladwell always carefully attends to formal composition within the picture plane, as well as to the representational history of such composition. The figure of the rider also serves to centre us in relation to the frame, providing a focal point, a visual sighting device through which we project our own entry into this vast landscape. Just as the rider constitutes an image of physical poise and balance, he also pictorially apportions and balances space. Shaun Gladwell; I really enjoy playing different positions in the production of art; either performing or being behind the camera, or studying someone else’s performance, so it’s not all about my performance. It’s also about trying to analyse the world in which other performers participate. Shaun Gladwell quoted by – Rosemary Sorensen. Quotes Gladwell’s practice critically engages personal experience as well as wider speculation upon art history and the dynamics of contemporary culture… his recent projects in video have made discursive links between historical models and understanding of the body in space such as the flaneur and contemporary cultural figures such as the skateboarder, the motocross rider, the freestyle BMX rider, break dance crews, a capoeira practitioner and other physical and street performers. The work generally deals with performance figures in pace, disrupting the social and architectural programming of urban spaces in particular. As this ongoing investigation of spatial articulation has deepened and gathered momentum it has begun to more closely inform and be reflected in the instillation structures of the work its self, with an increased experimentation with multi- channel formats and architectural features as projection surfaces.