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Thursday, October 25, 2012

Copybox Boxcopy

     Situated upstairs at 129 Margaret Street in the middle of Brisbane city, is the discrete home of Boxcopy, another hole-in-the wall artist-run-initiative (ARI). Its partially hidden doorway opened into a darkened room with a desk in it and some video screens on the wall that illuminated the interior. Another set of doors led out of the room, but they were closed, and I wondered what was in the other part of the gallery... until I found out that this small room was all there was.

     The video art was titled She'll be Right, and was a work by an artistic duo called Clark Beaumont. It involved a reworking of aspects of the Australian films, Muriel's Wedding and The Castle. Both of these films represented Australian identity by exploring the ironies and hardships that the Aussie “battler” confronts in modern everyday life. Thus the soundtrack was familiar to me, “Heslop, Heslop, Heslop!” was a cry I had uttered myself in high school drama class whilst preforming the scene of the troubled brother playing football with himself in the backyard in Muriel's Wedding. So I stood in the Boxcopy's room, peering at the videos through the gloom, showing the two female artists parodying this scene in order to “return to the site of identity production”i. It certainly returned me to the site of identity production, because I and my peers had all quoted both movies at some length, for the films engaged directly with the Australian psyche.

     The videos all showed the same looped series of clips that the artists have re-performed, albeit at differently timed intervals. This was a little confusing to me, because it was simply the same video on different screens, with the screens set at different levels around the darkened room, giving me the sense that the artists or curators were simply padding the exhibition out. And as much as the videos were a nostalgic sojourn into the formation of individual and national identity, they lacked any applicable creative significance for me. I could have got the same impressions from simply watching the original films again, and having the artists re-performing them simply reinforced the power of those films as formative identity markers for the Australian character, and failed to engage me with the works on an artistic level. Thus I would disagree with Emily Lush when she writes that She'll be Right offers “a new framework for the way we approach our projected selves and engage with our mirrors.”ii It simply offers an old way to engage with our appropriated identities and feel warm and cosy as those familiar and non-threatening identities are relived.

     I was unable to spend much time in Boxcopy, because it felt like a closet, and after viewing the looped videos for several minutes, I determined their nature and grew bored and found nothing else to engage my attention in the darkened room. The lonely assistant sat at her desk, face illuminated by her laptop, (absorbing and projecting an identity within the internet most likely).

     It is great to have ARI's that support the roles of emerging artists in Brisbane, itself an emerging Art-city. It is also great for artists to be given the opportunity to freely express their ideas creatively and have a platform to show them from. She'll be Right is a strong reminder of the contours of the Australian identity, yet it failed to excite or inspire me.

iLush, E. 2012, I'll be Your Mirror, Clark Beaumont She'll be Right, exhibition overview, Boxcopy, Brisbane.
iiLush, E. 2012, I'll be Your Mirror, Clark Beaumont She'll be Right, exhibition overview, Boxcopy, Brisbane.

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