Derek Hart
moving image - mixed media - installation
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2009-2010
2005-2008
1997-2004
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selected works 2005-2008

Bivalve, 2008, two-channel projection, DVCPro video, 32mins, silent (excerpt).
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"The 'strangeness' itself is apparent but the mechanism of its construction is not. One senses a slight oddness, a remove from the apparent known but the engagement engendered is not intruded upon by artifice or any sense of obvious or overt manipulation. One is held, time suspends, the elemental aspect of the work, the 'sensate', is dominant in the experience. Bivalve exemplifies this character completely.

The abiding 'content' referent which ties fro and to together is water. Water moving – forward, backwards, speeding up into abstraction (Channel, 2008); water flowing sensuously over the bulbous lips of a sink edge in the exquisitely sexual Smouldering (2008) in which the artist neatly conflates the flowing water with the smoke which prolonged exposure with the work may suggest. This is highly 'physical' work, replete with sensuality and carefully mediated allusion."

Seán Kelly, 'Time Tides', Art Monthly Australia, June issue, no.230.

Smouldering, 2008, two-channel projection, DVCPro video, 5 mins, silent.

 

View of Smouldering in fro and to, solo exhibition at The Design Centre, Launceston, Tasmania, 16 Aug - 14 Sept 2008. Reviewed in Photofile, Dec 2008 - Mar 2009, issue 85, published the Australian Centre for Photography.

Channel, 2008, single-channel, DVCPro video, 3 mins, silent.

   

Awash, 2006, site-specific installation, D'Entrecasteaux Channel. Part of the Peppermint Bay Sculpture Prize, Woodbridge, Tasmania.

 

In Awash, reclaimed, ceramic hand basins, their backs enamelled, are paired to appear as clam-like forms. Twenty six were situated across 300 meters of tidal water stretching from the oyster shell-encrusted shore out to a reef, the performative installation alternately exposed then concealed by the tide, and activated by changing light. These domestic objects are transformed by their new context, assimilated by the ever-changing environment, setting in motion the imagination.

Fleet, 2005, site-specific installation, Sullivans Cove precinct Hobart. Part of Dockworks, an offsite CAST Gallery exhibition for the Hobart Summer Festival, coordinated with Tasmanian Ports Authority.

 

Coinciding with the Sydney to Hobart Yacht Race, Fleet comprised fifty reclaimed, ceramic hand basins, their backs enamelled to form a continuous surface, situated upright at the mean height of the shifting tidal water and so alternately exposed and submerged at low and high tide. Reflected light rippled across the gleaming forms as across the hulls of boats, at the same time evoking the billowing sails of the racing yachts. As with Awash, time was allowed to structure the work.

Vanity Fish, 2008, double marble vanity top, bisected and realigned.

 

 

Cone around a Conifer 2006
Site-specific installation, aerial photograph and RTBG signage. Part of Come with Me, Royal Tasmanian Botanical Gardens, Hobart.

An aerial photograph is mounted on two RTBG signage stands, each facing a large conifer in the middle of the lawn from a different angle - about 30° apart. The aerial photograph, showing the conifer at its exact centre, is rotated so that its depiction of the surrounding gardens aligns with each respective point of view. One can imagine two sections of a great cone with the camera position at its pinnacle.

 

 

 

 

 

© Derek Hart 2011.