The Samstag Alumni

The 2004 Anne & Gordon Samstag
International Visual Arts Scholarships

Guy Benfield | Louisa Bufardeci | Julie Henderson |
TV Moore | Simone Slee | Tim Sterling |

Julie Henderson's pieces tend to the fragmentary. Their focus is on simple repetitions, repertoires that constitute poetic metaphors for, or analogues of, psychic states-the camera typically focussing on just a gesture or move, not even including the whole body of the performer. In them action is repeated, the time might often be 'real time'-that is, not telescoped or compressed-but it might also be suspended, timeless, moments 'out of time'.

Henderson's video performances treat areas of experience and cognition that are liminary or which shift undecidably between the subliminal and the conscious. The effect can be a resemblance to an image caught from a waking dream, an image tied firmly to a mood and recognizable as having been subject to unconscious attention and interrogation. The time of such pieces is that of prolonged attention, not that of recounting or syllogism.

Henderson's works all deal with, and deal in, corporeal movement and notions of speed or pace. One class of these is made up of responses to a site or, as with the collaborations with Scottish artist Kevin Henderson, responses to another's work. In these pieces the operation is more interpretative and the videos themselves focus less on a single image, are less fragmentary: they feature the performer's body whole, framed in time and space. Again, they give analogues of states of displacement-or they seek to show such dislocation bridged, annulled.

Ken Bolton
from his Samstag catalogue essay;
New Brew: Export Quality Six-Pack

• The Samstag Alumni

Striptease (entr'acte) 2003
stills from video projection
continuous loop
© the artist
To view the multimedia presentation follow this link

High Rise 2001
still from video projection
David Jones Building, Adelaide
© the artist