Kieran Boland
Screen Test (1999)
Talk Artists Initiative, Melbourne
Level 6 Nicholas Building
23.6.99 - 3.7.99
Beneath nine A2 size C-Type photographs are twenty-six dreams from a twelve month period presented in a chronological sequence on randomly selected coloured A4 paper*. The dreams were recorded immediately on waking within 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 then pink then green then yellow and so on. The colour itself is not significant, only serving the purpose of making it immediately obvious during the shoot that everyone has the latest version. As an 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 were from my own everyday environment. As a reversal of the movie location scouting process, the nine images act as residual memory projections for environments associated with the nine film characters depicted from memory on the opposite wall. The audience is therefore positioned between a series of isolated figures (known only through representation) and the shifting ground of impersonally transcribed memories of fleeting dreams that often featured actors from cinema or television.

Wall #1 (left) Wall #2 (right)

WALL #1 (Left) 9 x C-Type Photographs 42 x 60cm (1999) Type on 26 sheets of coloured paper, each 29.7 x 21 cm (1998-9) WALL #2 (Right) 9 x Pencil, ink, gouache on paper, each 60 x 42 cm (1999)

WALL #1: Screen Test Dreams (1998-99) Type on coloured paper, 8 of 26. Each 29.7 x 21 cm

WALL #1: Screen Test Dreams (1998-99) Detail. Type on coloured paper. Each 29.7 x 21 cm

WALL #1: Screen Test Dreams (1998-99) Detail. Type on coloured paper. Each 29.7 x 21 cm

WALL #1 : Screen Test Location Scout No.2 [Deliverance 1972] Early Psychosis Prevention and Intervention Centre, Parkville. C-Type Photograph 42 x 60cm (1999)

WALL #2 (Opposite) : <last seen nine years ago> [Deliverance 1972] Pencil, ink, gouache on paper 60 x 42 cm (1999)

WALL #1 : Screen Test Location Scout No.6 [The China Syndrome 1978] CSL Limited, Parkville. C-Type Photograph 42 x 60cm (1999)

WALL #2 (Opposite) : < seen on TV in the past 12 months > [The China Syndrome 1978] Gouache and pencil on paper 90 x 60cm (1999)