ART CITIES:Sydney-Pipilotti Rist
As one of the first generation of artists to grow up with televisions in their living rooms, Rist’s work references the history of new media, with her early videos presented on monitors and her recent works projected across ceilings, floors and walls. From the beginning Rist has been an innovator, readily engaging with advances in technology and new ways of making art.
By Efi Michalarou
Photo: Museum of Contemporary Sydney Archive
Over the past 30 years, Pipilotti Rist has achieved international renown as a pioneer of video art and multimedia installations. Pipilotti Rist’s solo exhibition “Sip my Ocean” is part of the Sydney International Art Series. This major retrospective features her large-scale installations incorporating video, sculpture and performance that often envelop viewers in vibrantly coloured projections of light and music to create sensual and immersive environments. Occupying the entire third floor of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Sydney, along with breakout works on the second and floor, the exhibition is choreographed as a sequence of different viewing experiences. Viewers are invited to sit down on oversized red sofas in “Das Zimmer” (1994-2017), to walk through a magical forest of hanging lights in “Pixelwald Motherboard” (2016), and a maze of floating fabric in “Administrating Eternity” (2011) or to lie down and look up at “4th Floor to Mildness” (2016) and rest on the floor cushion to watch “Lobe of the Lung” (2009). Key works from Rist’s career form this exhibition including her earliest most well-known dual-channel video projections “Sip my Ocean” (1996) and “Ever is Over All” (1997). Mirrored across the corner of a room, “Sip my Ocean” (1996) shows fragments of a man and a woman in a salmon dress and a yellow bikini swimming underwater and images of sinking tea cups, television sets, toys, floating plants and coral. The music and lyrics cover Chris Isaak’s song “Wicked Game” (1990). A voice is heard singing and finally screaming ‘I don’t want to fall in love’. The lyrics are interwoven with the imagery, which plays hypnotically with the music, morphing in and out of the corner like the ebb and flow of the tide. The title of the work is sexually suggestive of the body and the ocean demonstrating how Rist’s work can blend the intimate and the universal. “Administrating Eternity” (2011) places the viewer in the heart of the work. Surrounded by images and sound, and fabric swaying in the air, the shadows created by the viewer’s body become part of the work. The installation is made from a maze of translucent veils hung from the ceiling, multiple projections from different corners of the room and a soundscape. Projections of sheep, cows and pristine Swiss mountain ranges bleed across the hanging fabric and within the space. It is a work of shifting atmospherics. The title of the work means to manage and care for the future. “Pixelwald Motherboard” (2016) imagines a television screen exploding into a room. The work expands pixels into forms that float in three-dimensional space, referencing how images on a screen are made from hundreds of pixels. Produced in collaboration with Kaori Kuwabara, the work is made from a forest of 3000 LED lights suspended from cables that overlap across the ceiling like the vines of a jungle forest. Viewers can walk on a path through the hanging light vines of the work. Each sculptural LED is operated by a separate video signal that reacts to music in the corresponding exhibition spaces. The work is ever changing, with sequences of light that twinkle or surge like a wave of vibrant colour in response to the music.
Info: Curator: Natasha Bullock, Museum of Contemporary Art, 140 George Street, The Rocks, Sydney, Duration: 1/11/17-18/2/18, Days & Hours: Mon-Tues & Thu-Sun 10:00-17:00, Wed: 10:00-21:00, www.mca.com.au
