Nightshift
An immersive multiscreen video installation, exploring text and image at the edges of awareness
A collaboration with dancer and choreographer, Wendy McPhee
Nightshift is a multichanel video installation exploring the concept of ‘subliminal’ messaging, and based on a series of performances and texts by dancer and choreographer Wendy McPhee, exploring femine desire, peep-show aesthetics, and the dynamic of the viewer and the viewed.
Inspired by the urban mythology of ‘subliminal’ advertising as popularised by Walter Keys in his 1972 book “Subliminal Seduction” - and the hypntotic trance-inducing states of consciousness facilitaed by stroboscopic lights/images and pulsating minimal rhythms – Nightshift was built entirely around a series of performances filmed at McPhee’s rehearsal studio using stroboscopic lighting, and later edited digitally with the addition of single-frame texts interspersed between the frames of McPhee’s performance.
The individual video files were edited with a significant amount of ‘black’ space between the different choreographic gestures - so that when viewed on the grid of semi-transparent screens ditributed through the exhibition space - the images and text seemed to flicker and jump around the space, refusing the eye any fixed resting space, instead drawing the viewer into a disociative trance like state of spatial fragmentation and disengagement.
Half of the texts used throughout the videos that where projected through the exhibition space, were displayed in ‘reverse’ - with the effect that there was no single ‘correct’ side of the screens from which to ‘read’ the images, and also further referencing ‘subliminal’ stragetgies popularised by Keys.
Similarly, the text fragments spoken by McPhee and interspersed through the installation soundtrack, also made extensive use of reversed recordings.
On the way to ‘Eat My Shorts’, I happened into George Khut’s installation and almost missed the show I’d come to see.
To describe the elements gives little sense of their combined effect. In the dark, on 2 lightweight screens are projected black and white images of the dancer Wendy McPhee. Layered over her fragmented movement is a flickering text. Words and limbs fly as in some wild rewind to a score that sounds like film spooling or slides shuddering and with a hint of distant voices.
Sitting at either end of the installation my eyes choreograph a subliminal dance from a language of barely detected forms and lightning fast words, sometimes projected backwards.
George Khut has plans to extend this work and show it more extensively. It certainly deserves a longer look and a wider audience.
– Virginia Baxter, RealTime issue #46 Dec-Jan 2001
Production Credits
George Khut: Installation concept, video editing and sound design
Wendy McPhee: Performer, choreographer, texts and art-direction
Exhibition History
2003
Nightshfit, exhibited in Inbetween Time 2003, festival of live art and intrigue. Arnolfini, Bristol, Great Britain. Curated by Helen Cole
‘Nightshift’ exhibited in Dancers are Space Eaters, Perth Institute of Contemporary Art, Perth, Western Australia. Curated by Sarah Miller
2002
Nightshift, exhibition at Artspace, Sydney,NSW, Australia. Curated by Nick Tsoutas
Nightshift, exhibition at The Bond Store, Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery, Hobart, Australia. Curated by Bill Bleathman
2001
New Work: George Poonkhin Khut with Wendy McPhee, 2-screen prototype, presented as part of Carnivale multicultural visual arts program, Performance Space, Redfern, New South Wales
Acknowledgements
This project has been supported by the Australian Federal Government, though the Australia Council for the Arts, its arts funding and advisory body, and Arts Tasmania.
Special thanks to curators Sarah Miller (Perth Institute of Contemporary Art), Fiona Winning (Performance Space), Helen Cole (Arnolfini), Bill Bleathman (Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery, Hobart) and Nick Tsoutas (Artspace).