"Thinking Out Loud: Installations by Christian Marclay (USA), Ed Osborne (Finland), Tony Oursler (USA), Jana Sterbak (Chech/Canada)"
2004-10-17 until 2004-11-28
Heide Museum of Modern Art
Melbourne, VI, AU Australia

The show is presented as a part of this years Melbourne International Arts Festival which traditionally concentrates on music and performing arts. The installations presented are also all about sounds and performance. The sounds, images and objects, created by the artists, deal with phenomena of human speech as the means of reflecting the inner mind of contemporary being. They literarily give voice to the world of emotions and ideas, which is confronted by ambiguity, pain of isolation, misjudgement and misunderstanding. Variations of spoken word presented at the show bring back all so familiar sense of multiple meanings, their subjectivity, distortion, susceptibility to contrasting semantics and dependence on the given context.

The sound and primarily - that one of the human speech and words in various languages, including the sign language, are presented very differently in the works of every artist. Ed Osborne plays individually a multitude of recorded sounds on several speakers at the same time. In Tony Ourslers Incubator sound is combined with an image which is projected onto a surface of an object. While Jana Sterbak in her Declaration loops a video recording of a stuttering actor reading a text on the TV screen. Her installation is also greatly enhanced by its essential part - two armchairs: Swan and Egg, designed by Danish legend Arne Jacobsen - very much symbols of everything that was and still is fresh, advanced and sophisticated of the 1960s.

Works of these four artists have been specifically and very successfully chosen for the space which they are presented at: an impressive example of the modernist residential architecture of the 1960s, the former home of John and Sunday Reed. In this case the architecture plays an integral role as an actual curator of the work displayed. As the building itself the installations are minimalist, modern and sophisticated in their tools and colors used, leaving the recorded sounds to take the allocated space, guiding, daunting and attracting visitors.

- Ausra Larbey

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