Matthew Stanton | Conversation Piece

Be drawn into the quiet stillness of Matthew Stanton’s 'Conversation Piece' at MARS Gallery.

A Melbourne-based artist, Matthew Stanton’s practice is fed by his dual role as artist and educator. He utilises the mediums of still photography, 16mm film and video to explore relationships between surface, space and duration within the genres of landscape and portraiture.

Stanton’s latest work Conversation Piece is currently on show at MARS Gallery. It is a 16mm dual film installation that contemplates the nature of the portrait image in relationship to topologies of surface and duration.

A seven minute loop, the references the 7-minute exposure times typical of Julia Margaret Cameron’s (1815 – 1879) 19^th century photographic portraits.  Cameron’s long-exposed photographs created a blur, where the subject moved and left the lens intentionally out of focus resulting in a soft, hazy result. Similarly, Stanton’s filmed portrait of a woman echoes that sentiment, exploring the imprinting, transmission and translation of the “time image” in cinematic process.

Opposite the woman is the ocean, given the same treatment it is 7 minutes in duration and mirrors the other screen in scale and static frame. Landscape or portrait of landscape? The perspective is up to you. The durational projections of the woman and the sea reflects the possibility of light and human presence as a mute conversation unfolds with intersecting dualities – the static and animate, the actual and the virtual.

There is something human about the two screens and their quiet gaze, go join in on the conversation, Conversation Piece is on show until 14 May.

EXHIBITION
Matthew Stanton | Conversation Piece
Until 14 May
MARS Gallery

Courtesy the artist and MARS Gallery, Melbourne.