Desafinado
In the making of Desifinado, I continued my practice of working hard rubbish and how the refiguring process can energise mundane and rejected objects, turning them into novel forms without destroying the object's status as rubbish, as a way of reflecting on over-consumption in an increasingly resource depleted world in my home city of Melbourne. I once again combined sculptural forms with two-dimensional works which depict combinations of images sourced from online and renditions of my sculptural works. I also explored using song for the first time.
I used Google Earth to draw circles radiating out from the Gallery location in 12 equally spaced lines (the number of notes in a musical scale). I “travelled” along these lines in Google Earth and zoomed in wherever I saw signs of human habitation and architecture. I supplemented the satellite images with image searches and drew representations of each town, village or city I travelled through in order away from the gallery as a way of mapping the distance around the world. I was interested in exploring ways in which the internet enables and certain perceptions of the world and therefore of ourselves in relation to it; of having incredible access to global information, especially visually, but also of having lost something of our physical relevance. With the gain comes a sense of loss of experiencing presence.
The sculpture Compass was central to the installation and was situated in the gallery with each plane pointing along one of the twelve lines mapped out in the drawings. The correlating plane was depicted in each drawing thus, orientating the linear maps. Compass was constructed of found timber drawers and cupboards. Similarly to the clothing made for Sweet Dreams Are Made of This, the domed form gestures at grandiosity, and an aspirational longing, while the use of reclaimed materials suggests the futility of such longing. The compass motif is central to the themes of seeking, searching and motion that I am exploring with this work.
The sound work was a recording of the Brazilian song, ‘Desafinado’ performed by me, from which this exhibition takes its title. It's a song I loved for its melody and style before I understood the lyrics, but on a much-delayed train from Switzerland into Italy, a fellow passenger; a Brazillian translated it for me. He loved the song too and explained how it was about a man who doesn’t measure up – who sings out of tune and isn’t good looking, asking his lover to understand that there is beauty even in these imperfections.
