REAL DANGER
ALEX GAWRONSKI
18 July - 11 August, 2001
Sydney based artist and writer Alex Gawronski is one of the co-founders
and administrators of artist run space Blaugrau, a year long project
dedicated to promoting work which is explorative, experimental,
multi-dimensional, political, playful and open-ended. Alex
has created two projects for The Physics Room, REAL DANGER,
currently showing in the projection room of the gallery, and Blizzard,
which kicks off the beginning of The Physics Rooms curated
series at the Kiosk.
In REAL DANGER, a full screen projection shows two trains nearly colliding
in continuos repetition, one train bearing the image REAL while
the other declares DANGER. Behind the projections screen can
be seen the actual toy trains, crossing as they traverse two intertwining
circular tracks, captured and projected by a closed circuit video
system, and caught in perpetual motion.
REAL DANGER works on multiple levels, operating as a visual pun which plays
on an absurd humor of artificial illusion, the real danger
suggested merely a mirage. Historically it references the first
film images ever publicly presented - a steam train entering the
Gare St Lazare as filmed by the Lumiere brothers in the early 1900s.
As a machine the work refers both to the means of actual physical
travel as well as the representation of the phenomenological spectacle
of motion for its own sake. In this context the words REAL DANGER
animate metaphorically a moving yet historically static (outdated)
technology.
Reviews & EssaysREAL DANGER - Alex Gawronski
Essay by Andrew Paul Wood
in The Physics
Room Annual 2001
ISBN 0-9582359-1-0
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