Arlo Mountford's artist talk at the opening weekend of '21st Century: Art in the First Decade'. © 2010 QAG|GoMA This summer 2010--11, to mark the end of the first decade of this millennium, the Gallery presents '21st Century: Art in the First Decade' at the Gallery of Modern Art (GoMA), Brisbane, Queensland, Australia from 18 December 2010 -- 26 April 2011. Arlo Mountford makes digital animations that are often filled with art historical references. Habitually peopling his works with stick figures who rummage through the canon of twentieth-century art, he embarked in 2007 on an ambitious project to animate three paintings by Pieter Bruegel the Elder: The hunters in the snow 1565, 'The harvesters' 1565 and 'Landscape with the fall of Icarus' c.1558. Mountford set in motion the action implied in each painting, which occurs successively as the soundtrack leads the viewer's attention from one animation to the next. Typical of Mountford's work, 'The Folly' makes many references to art and culture. The title refers to the elaborate but purposeless architectural embellishments, or follies, that were built in aristocratic gardens, often to keep the workforce occupied. In the central image, one of the peasant women addresses the resting harvesters about the virtue of moving ideas around one's head without the commitment of actually producing something; a passage from Aldous Huxley's 1936 novel 'Eyeless in Gaz'a that Mountford thought resembled his working process. The title also refers to the fall of Icarus, which Bruegel famously depicted in the middle ground, foregrounding instead the ploughman, shepherd and angler who witnessed the incident in the account by the Classical poet Ovid. In a final comic touch, it is one of Mountford's stick figures that drops from the sky, as though the artist acknowledges the folly of his own ambitious project. | WORKS IN THE EXHIBITION | Arlo Mountford | Australia b.1978 | 'The Folly' 2007--09 | Three-channel digital video installation: 9 minutes, digital animation, colour, four-channel stereo, ed. 1/5. Purchased 2009. The Queensland Government's Queensland Art Gallery Acquisitions Fund. Collection: Queensland Art Gallery | EXHIBITION WEBSITE | http://qag.qld.gov.au/exhibitions/current/21st_Century | EXHIBITION PHOTOSTREAM | http://www.flickr.com/photos/queenslandartgallery

Comments

1. Writing an essay for a course on Contemporary Australian Art on the theme of installation works by Australians- this is wonderful, such a great peek at the work, and very helpful information/insight. Thank you!