A SLOW FADE . TO BLACK
Ocular Lab: 31 Pearson Street, Brunswick West, Melbourne Australia
Ian Whittlesea (UK)
For his show at Ocular Lab Ian Whittlesea will be presenting a very slow movie.
The film's title, A SLOW FADE . TO BLACK will be displayed on a poster outside the gallery, continuing the artist's twenty year engagement with the relationship between text and space.
On each of the 15 days that he is in Melbourne Whittlesea will repaint an area of the wall of the Lab. Each day this square will be painted a darker shade of grey, until with the 15th coat of paint it finally becomes black. Inevitably the progress towards a black square references Malevich and Reinhardt, yet the shape might simply be an enormously enlarged full stop, the end of an unseen sentence.
The process will be visible from the street, so if you were to walk past each morning you would be able to sense rather than see the change in colour from day to day. Each afternoon a photo will be taken from the same place in the gallery. At the end of the show these photos will animated to make a movie that shows a quicker (but still slow) fade to black.
This piece for Ocular Lab continues Whittlesea's interest in radically changing the duration of an experience. His work over the last few years has ranged from projecting lists of everyone an individual met in their lifetime (compressing 70 years of relationships into a few hours) to showing the first chapter of Thoreau's Walden one word at a time over 25 hours (slowing the act of reading to breaking point).
Born in 1967 Ian Whittlesea lives and works in London, UK. This is his first exhibition in Australia since 2003, when he showed as part of Six Conjectural Modules curated by Sandra Bridie and at CNR, Melbourne. He has recently completed a five year project to gain his black belt at judo and then translate (for the first time into English) Yves Klein's 1954 book ‘Les Fondements du Judo’, to be published by The Everyday Press, London.
This exhibition is supported by the British Council.
Ocular Lab: 31 Pearson Street Brunswick West
Dates to view work: December 6-21
This work is viewable from outside of Ocular Lab through its window
Closing event with documentation: Sunday 21st December 3-5pm
For more information:
Website: ianwhittlesea.net /
Ocular Lab Poster December: Ian Whittlesea
