NewActon East Foyer
Canberra ACT Australia
5-24 April 2009


Presented by:                  
Nectar Efkarpidis
The Molonglo Group

Artists:                             
Martin Bell, Melbourne
Anat Ben-David, London / Jerusalem

Curators:                          
Andy Mac, Melbourne
Adi Nachman, Tel Aviv / Berlin

Spooky Action at a Distance is a collaborative temporary video/sculptural installation which has been created on site at NewActon in Canberra during April 2009 by artists Anat Ben-David of London/Jerusalem and Martin Bell of Melbourne, with collaboration by curators Adi Nachman from Tel Aviv/Berlin and Andy Mac of Citylights Projects in Melbourne. The exhibition has been conceived by Nectar Efkarpidis on behalf of the Molonglo Group and the apartments at NewActon.

/      The title of the project, Spooky Action at a Distance is a derisive quote by Albert Einstein, relating to Quantum Physics. It implies that there exists a strange, instantaneous, connection between particles, that persists even when they are separated by great distances.

/      With its fuzzy superpositions and confused states of reality, which seem paradoxical and counterintuitive, Spooky Action at a Distance seemed an equally apt description of the creative collaborative process culminating in this exhibition.

/      Band is a new video works and photo prints series by multi-disciplinary artist Anat Ben-David. It is based on seven different musical group scenes constructed from video and digital fragments, cloning and multiplying the image of the artist in such a way that all different members of each band are performed by the artist, who also composed and recorded original music for each band.

/      The members of Band are multicultural, multinational, multilingual and fictional. Each different band is characterized by its own look and environment. The result is simultaneously outer-worldly and familiar.

/      The characters serve as vessels that absorb culture and regurgitate a new language. Different national identities and cultures are mixed up. The intended effect is that of a parallel universe, where things seem familiar, but are nevertheless strangely and slightly rearranged.

/      The artist's body and identity are the raw material of representation, the artist herself detached from her own identity yet identified with her characters, just liken actor in film or theatre. Thus, a group identity is created as a result of the cloning, but at the same time each possesses individual traits.

/      Martin Bell's Cowboy Style is a cut-up-sculptural collage that references and connects with a wide array of pop cultural and art historical moments, narrating a Western revenge adventure not unlike the 70's film West World, wherein a cowboy robot in a theme park (like a sci-fi Sovereign Hill) goes crazy and starts killing visitors to the park.

/      Constructed by Bell of inkjet prints and mixed media, including live domestic plants, and supported by a three-dimensional timber armature, Cowboy Style has a humorous relationship to Tatlin's unrealized and utopian revolutionary model for the Monument to the Third International, and Marcel Duchamp's Nude Descending a Staircase No.2, amongst many diverse references.

/      Like any good western, there are heroes and villains, heroines and rattlesnakes lurking. Cowboy Style is a dangerous and deadly journey. Ultimately emerging from the jagged undergrowth of Bell's construction, the viewer stands on the bank of a river, like Johnny Depp in Jim Jarmusch's Dead Man, perhaps fatally wounded and bleeding profusely, whereupon a chopped and rickety canoe sitting on a tractor tyre awaits to deliver you to sanctuary.

/      We wish you a good day.

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Curators
Adi Nachman & Andy Mac