Screen test

1999 | Printed Type on Colour A4 paper | Photographic prints | Gouache and pencil on Paper |

Beneath nine A2-size C-Type photographs are twenty-six dreams from the past twelve months, presented in chronological sequence on randomly selected colored A4 paper. The dreams were recorded immediately upon waking in a film script format wherever possible. Central to the project was the discovery that within the film-making process, a script may start on white paper, then move to blue, pink, green, yellow, and so on. The color itself is not significant, serving only to make it immediately obvious during the shoot that everyone has the latest version. For example, Jack Nicholson remarked in Making The Shining—a short documentary by Vivian Kubrick on the set of her father's 1980 horror film—that he quit using the original script altogether: "I just take the ones they type up each day."

The photographs taken during the same timeframe are from my own everyday environment. As a reversal of the movie location scouting process, the nine images act as residual memory projections for environments I could associate with the nine film characters depicted from memory on the opposite wall in pencil and gouache. The audience is thus positioned between a series of isolated figures—known only through representation—and the shifting ground of impersonally transcribed memories of fleeting dreams in which the appearance of actors from cinema or television was common.

Exhibited at Talk Artists Initiative, Level 6, Nicholas Building, Melbourne 23.6.99 - 3.7.99