There are many great Australian video artists but the video artists I mentioned in the title I met at art-school or just after art school at the artist collective gallery called Imperial Slacks in Surry Hills Sydney.
I also had a connection to some of the artists as me and my artist friend Katthy Cavaliere organised a video art night at Performance Space Gallery in Sydney and its title was Glow-Bytes and the rationale was artists who make films not film makers who make films and the videos were to be less than 5 minutes. There were about 25 artists in the show.
Shaun Gladwell was at the video night but at that stage he was a painter and after a successful painting show at Barry KeldoulisGallery bought a good video camera that I think was 10k and started shooting video art and one of his first videos was titled Storm Sequence where he was skateboarding at the Bondi pool doing freestyle tricks and the crashing waves and storm in the background and water droplets on the lens. The video was showed widely including at the Museum of Contemporary Art Sydney and ended up being the highest selling video art in Australia for 90 thousand dollars. Behind the camera of Storm Sequence was Techa Noble.
Gladwell also went on to represent Australia in the Venice Biennial and Angelica Misti did too. I didn’t see Gladwell’s video installation in person at the biennial but I did see Mesiti’s and it was amazing.
“Angelica Mesiti represented Australia at the 58th Venice Biennale in 2019 with her major exhibition titled ASSEMBLY, curated by Juliana Engberg.
ASSEMBLY was a three-channel video installation, presented in the Australian Pavilion, that explored the nature of connection, democracy, and community in the modern world.
The theme of the work addressed the “dissolution of old orders” and proposed new ways of coming together—a “choreography of movement”—in times of political crisis. “
Angelica studied media art at College of Fine Arts and a group of women from COFA including her started a drag video art group and they formed as performance/video artists after winning a drag night dress up in New York but had performed in drag nights in Sydney too. Other members included: Técha Noble, Emma Price and Katie Price.
“Emerging from Sydney’s drag king scene, the group is known for using drag to subvert mainstream culture, remixing elements from pop culture, fashion, and art history to explore themes of gender, consumerism, and corporate branding.”
While in South Korea I saw one of the King Pins video installations at the Gwanju biennale and it was fantastic. The best part was a video of them dancing in matching tracksuits and with fake moustaches in a Starbucks in South Korea.
One of my closest friends is Sean Cordeiro who lives in the Blue Mountains and he and his partner Claire Healy who collaborate together have two teenage children Jonah and Astrid and they often travel abroad to exhibit and shoot video and make sculptures and installations and do residencies and international shows. They are incredibly, successful artists in many mediums of sculpture, installation, video and painting and have been exhibiting in Australia and abroad for decades and have made multiple large size commissions in Australia.
However, it’s a video they shot in Australia that has peaked, my interest while looking at their website today. It features a glider titled Many Hands Make Light Work.
This is some text from their website about it:
“This video was filmed at “Pipers Gliding Club” in Bathurst: a town located not far from where we live. Although gliding is perceived to be a solo pursuit, it takes many people working together to launch the glider into the skies. The action of the video focuses on the collective co-operation of the people working together on the ground.”
Katthy Cavaliere was an amazing Italian born Australian contemporary artist who died of cancer aged 39. Her mature work was largely performance art but it is her video documentation of her performance work that stood out the most for me. She was an incredibly close friend of mine since just after art school where we both did our masters around the same time me in sculpture and her in photography.
I also feel that my video art fits in with contemporary Australian video artists of this generation and I have written about my favourite video which was shown at the Mothership Salon exhibition after the Mothership studio residency in Brooklyn New York in early 2024 and I showed a video titled: Who Wants to be my Han Solo? where I was on my local beach dressed in a Star Wars Chewbacca costume standing ankle deep in the ocean and sitting on a stool reading an artist book of my original drawings.
In conclusion I made the title Australian Video Art and the Everyday Sublime as I feel the connection between all these video artists is a search for the sublime or spirituality of fragments of everyday life in Australia and from their international travels over the past twenty-five years.