RMIT School of Art is thrilled to see so many staff, students and alumni featured in the NGV exhibition Melbourne Now.

Today we feature Senior Industry Fellows Sonia Leber and David Chesworth.

Senior Industry Fellows Sonia Leber and David Chesworth are known for their distinctive video, sound and architecture-based installations that are as audible as they are visible. Leber and Chesworth’s works are speculative and archaeological, often involving communities and elaborated from research in places undergoing social, technological or local geological transformation. Their works emerge from the real but exist in the realm of the imaginary, hinting at unseen forces and non-human perspectives.

Mission Crimps, 2021, emphasises a restless visual searching and plurality of sonic perspectives. An old telephone exchange, with its cable trays and colourful wires, metallic switches and exchange circuits, finds itself echoing the calibrations and configurations of the human mind. The play of electro-magnetic and acoustic sounds evokes the latent and subconscious restoration process occurring at night – that moment of intense brain activity enabling the assimilation of what happened during the day and the regeneration of our bodies and minds. Leber and Chesworth’s project also echoes the natural environment, as ineffable as the brain, with its systems of watery flows, dendritic spreads of tree branches, mountainous networks and dynamic exchange points. With Mission Crimps, the artists propose that both the brain and the natural environment are wired and dynamically re-wired in certain ways. This occurs through what the artists call ‘antinomic’ framings of the phenomena that they present; that is, framings that combine contradictory but independently valid and linked elements simultaneously.

Tuesday 18 July, 3.30–5.00pm
Wednesday 19 July, 3.30–5.00pm
Thursday 20 July, 3.30–5.00pm
Friday 21 July, 3.30–5.00pm
Saturday 22 July, 3.30–5.00pm
Sunday 23 July, 3.30–5.00pm

Co-curated with Olivia Koh from recess — a Melbourne-based online platform showcasing contemporary moving-image works — this series will comprise daily screenings in Community Hall. Featuring all Melbourne-based filmmakers, the films highlight the city’s breadth of talent in art-filmmaking — an expanding arena of creative practice with a bright future.

Free entry
Booking is not required

The Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia, Fed Square
Community Hall
Ground Level

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