Victorian College of the Arts - Research Publications

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Type: Visual Artwork × Start date: 2020 × End date: 2021 × Author: Radford, Lisa ×

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    The Master of the Scrovegni Chapel Choir presents Kylie White’s Manifesto of a Digital Relationship
    George, S ; Radford, L (CAVES, 2020-01-27)
    Using the manuscript of an affair conducted over email between 11 April and December 25, 2011 Sam George & Lisa Radford attempted to find a materiality in the space between Melbourne and San Diego mediated by technology in plaster, pigment, voice and time. The performances on January 25, an atomised opera, utilised the time the emails were sent to explore the space of desire and doubt in choral form. An opera singer chanted the verbal descriptions of the attachments (literal and figural) mostly images, that Kylie and David send to each other over the 9 month period.
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    The Dugong Sublime
    Radford, L ; George, S (Multiple venues, 2021-11-14)
    The Dugong Sublime (Hotel Sorrento) is polyphonic vocal performance that used extracts from Hannie Rayson’s script for Hotel Sorrento (1989) as means for giving a part voice to artworks by Stuart Ringholt and Mutlu Cerkez held in the collection of  Buxton Contemporary. The performance was been developed by Sam George and Lisa Radford, with Evelyn Pohl and Yundi Wang. It was performed by Freyja Black, Ivy Crago, Sophia Derkenne, Ludomyr Kemp-Mykyta and Iris Simpson Thanks to Jane E. German and Danny Lacy from Mornington Peninsular Regional Gallery and Mark Friedlander. Performance documentation by Ezz Monem Commissioned for This is a Poem, curated by Melissa Keys for Buxton Contemporary. Sam George and Lisa Radford’s The dugong sublime is an epic absurdist poem with multiple interconnecting and intertwined cultural and historical references, narratives and ideas. George and Radford’s episodic project began with the selection of two self-portraits – a painted self-portrait by Mutlu Çerkez Untitled: 17 April 2023 and Stuart Ringholt’s Everything I own, a bound book containing an inventory list of everything that the artist owned in the year 2002. While discussing the approach that they would take to creating their ekphrastic poem as part of this exhibition, George posed the question to Radford ‘what is the purpose of poetry’ – however, a slip of the tongue turned this question into ‘what is the porpoise of poetry’ at which point their investigation took an oceanic turn. Responding to their selected artworks through processes of association, intuition, emotion and sensation, the porpoise was soon replaced by the dugong, a gentle, highly social, sea creature that is of significance in numerous cultures and vulnerable to over-exploitation – vulnerability and social care being qualities that George and Radford identify in Çerkez and Ringholt’s approaches to art practice. The score of The dugong sublime is, in part, based on the echo sounding language of chirps, whistles and barks that dugong’s use underwater in order to communicate. After numerous attempts to swim with a dugong, each thwarted by rolling travel restrictions, an experience the artists had anticipated would be an encounter with the sublime, they turned their attention locally to Port Phillip bay – to look for a Dugong, in a place that they knew the animals cannot be found. While undertaking an artist’s residency at the Police Point, Quarantine Station, in the Point Nepean National Park, George recorded a sequence of video of the sea floor, that now forms part of this presentation. This recording is as much of the marine environment, as it is of an absence. During their stay in Point Nepean the artists came upon a number of old film reels held in the Queenscliff Gallery each of which was shot in the area. Among the reels is a copy of the post-apocalyptic science fiction film On the Beach (1959) and the film version of the well-known play Hotel Sorrento (1995) by Hannie Rayson that engages with Australia’s place in the world and the enduring impact of cultural cringe. Paired with the footage of the sea floor, scenes of Gregory Peck’s character in On the Beach, Commander Dwight Lionel Towers, is seen peering through a submarine periscope looking for signs of humanity. It is a sequence that ironically underscores the artists’ and their collaborators open-ended exploration and search with its multiple diversions and ellipses and no particular destination in mind but instead a series of natural phenomena, fragments of histories, and ideas alive with possibility.