Dark Matter

By Andrew Frost

For the first time the three works that make up Soda_Jerk’s Dark Matter Cycle are being exhibited together at UTS Gallery. The three works, The Phoenix Portal [2005], After The Rainbow [2009] and The Time That Remains [2012] are each concerned with imagining an alternative history through the repurposed sequences of Hollywood narrative: The Phoenix Portal connects appearances of the actor River Phoenix in two key films that span his too-short career while After The Rainbow introduces the adolescent Judy Garland of the Wizard of Oz to her adult self. The Time That Remains ghosts Joan Crawford and Bette Davis together into an epic of somnambulism, spirit apparition and revelation.

These three video works, discreetly staged in the gallery space, are a major accomplishment in Australian video art. Soda_Jerk have developed and advanced their work into the realm of a true hybridity – neither truly ‘video’ nor really ‘film’ the works have become something else, something only possible through a masterly understanding of their medium. The works overflow with connections; doubles and doppelgangers abound, glances and looks culled from source material and carefully compiled that go far beyond the taxonomy of the supercut into something truly remarkable, a fluid and breathtaking lucid dreaming that may mean nothing, or maybe everything.

Until August 30

UTS Gallery, Ultimo

arts.uts.edu.au

Pic: Soda_Jerk, The Time that Remains, 2012. 2-channel video, black & white, sound, 16:9, 11:56 minutes. Courtesy the artists and UTS Gallery.