Waveform Curated by Nathan Thompson
Waveform draws together four video works made by four New Zealand artists for whom sound constitutes a major part of their art practice.
Sound has been the poor cousin within the spectrum of video art, often used to add impact to the visual content of a project or as an atmospheric afterthought. Experimental film-maker Stan Brakhage abandoned the use of sound altogether half way through his career, claiming it interfered with the purity of the moving image. Although in international contexts video artists are beginning to pay increasing attention to the use of sound, it is still very hard to find many examples of sound artists crossing over into the world of moving image.
The New Zealand noise scene has had much international press over the past ten years, but again not much attention has been paid to the moving image output of these artists. It could be argued that New Zealand is one of the few places in the world where significant numbers of sound artists are actively shaping the face of moving image. This exhibition offers a small cross-section of this phenomenon.
