Separations - video - art show

Separations

An exhibition of Drawings, Prints, Paintings and Video Art

Featuring the work of

John Bennett, John Laidler, Janet Reinhardt and Bronwyn Rodden

8^th – 9^th October 2011, 10am to 5pm daily

Opening 6pm Friday, October 7th – with Jazz AR Duo

In this exhibition four artists explore the issue of separations in terms of both our alienation from our own nature and origins, as well as our increasing alienation from the natural world.

The video installations of Bird Lane Nettle (Bennett and Laidler) are really found poems addressing the Brownian motion of modern space-time, e.g. airports, and our separation from the natural environment and our cultural past. Their work has been shown at the Sydney Writers' Festival, the Queensland Poetry Festival and Newtown Film Festival.

Reinhardt and Rodden have worked and exhibited together before. Their prints, paintings, drawings and digital work examine both the beauty of the natural environment and our ephemeral and sometimes uncomfortable existence within this natural context. Rodden is shocked by the repercussions of our misuse of the earth’s resources and believes that our separation from nature leaves us vulnerable. Her work attempts to capture the fragile beauty of the natural world while Reinhardt explores our increasing alienation from this beauty.

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Separations A program of innovative video ⇄poetry from Bird Lane Nettle

Bird Lane Nettle are poet and camera wrangler John Bennett (www.jbpoet.com) and John Laidler, musician (Okapi Guitar Band), editor & sound engineer (www.cutsnakestudio.com).

BLN videos have been shown at the Sydney Writers' Festival, the Queensland Poetry Festival and Newtown Film Festival among others.

John B. writes: These videos are poems occurring by chance, just happening, yet the theme of separation emerges from our work in three ways. Firstly, some works explore leaving England or are situated in the uneasy Brownian motion of airports. Secondly, the work explores the natural environment concerned that art has dominated the discourse of aesthetics (and the aesthetics of natural phenomena generally ignored) - this should be resisted if our separation from nature is to be mended. Thirdly, some videos address the past, for example, Greek gods, aware that we are separating ourselves from our cultural past as well.

I carry cameras (one still, one HD camcorder) around with me; I have become a flaneur, a bricoleur playing with any subject that comes to hand. They are part of my life, refusing the segregation of art from everyday life, though that’s what you think the natural order is; that’s what we all think, influenced by the English Romantics and continental thinkers like Schiller and Baudelaire

After shooting I work closely with my colleague John Laidler in the studio. John is a musician with wonderful curiosity and a whizz in the studio. We usually work on the soundtrack together, often to enhance the rough sound and add small touches. John produces full blown beautiful soundtracks for some works, and sometimes we work together on the music.

Poetry is an everyday part of my life and should be a part of the ordinary – poets are not priests, poems are powerful bit not magical. I have added visuals to my sense of the poetic that refuses to segregate art from everyday life.