Video artist Sofie McClure will be exhibiting her new multiscreen audiovisual installation Forward, Backward at Quality in Abbotsford over the weekend of the 23rd of March.
Sofie is interested in film not merely as a visual medium, but as an embodied, multi-sensory practice. Viewing the camera as a receptor to a world inaccessible to the human eye, her work operates at the level of bodily memory and sensory experience that exceeds our cognitive or visual capacities. Sofie’s a member of Naarm-based film collective Dogmilk, her work has been shown at ACCA, Fiona and Sidney Myer Gallery, the St Kilda Film Festival and the Signal Building.
Compiling video and sound from various modes of transport and travel, Forward, Backward is a study of movement. Placed in the centre of the installation, the viewer is immersed in a perpetual state of transit, disoriented by the physical act of turning back and forward. Evoking the feeling of looking out of a window of a moving vehicle, the work is a blur until something catches your eye, coming into focus before slipping away. Intercutting the videos of transit are birds in flight, propelled forward by a path invisible to the human eye. Drawing into relief the complexities of human movement across land and water, Forward, Backward looks to the birds for direction.
Collaborating with sound artist Josh Peters, the work is a spatial sound experience, interweaving sound works made by Rebecca Bracewell, Andrew Wear, Felix Adsett and Xavier Wear Gardener.
