backDigital media screen works by Japan's teamLab were a highlight of Adelaide's 2016 OzAsia Festival. Now four new works are featured at Sydney's Martin Browne Contemporary.
In Gold Waves, a four-channel continuous loop that simulates a traditional room screen, roiling, curling and crashing waves suggest a Hokusai print come to life. Comprising hundreds of thousands of tiny 'water' particles which coalesce into lines of movement, the waves pound hypnotically, and as in a real ocean, unpredictably.
The water in Black Waves, a rivetting single channel loop, appears more blue than black and more suggestively akin to woodblock print colouring.
The exquisite single channel Enso (5 minutes), described by the makers as an exercise in Spatial Calligraphy, mimics the single Zen brushstroke that makes a circle but here adding a remarkable depth of field, shifting perspective and inky detail (fans of the film The Arrival will feel an immediate affinity).
Impermanent Life is a relative of the glorious, perpetually evolving Ever Blossoming Life which appeared in the OzAsia Festival. Across a four channel cluster of what appear to be gnarled tree roots, a mass of tiny blossoms drift and fall as a large circle forms and fades in another of teamLab's celebrations of the life cycle.
These are engrossing screen works which invite reverie and contemplation, and are best seen on their big screens in a quiet gallery,
For our reviews of teamLab at the 2016 OzAsia Festival, go here and here.
teamLab, Impermanent Life, Martin Browne Contemporary, Sydney, 27 April-21 May
RealTime issue #138 April-May 2017 pg.
© Keith Gallasch; for permission to reproduce apply to [email protected]
