In our second student exhibition to date, we proudly introduced:

Anna Murray and Campbell Patterson
3rd year BFA students at Elam
with 'Home Movies'

Exhibition 17 - 27 August 2005

In this two person show the audience’s role as viewers is plumbed in depth, to create feeling of voyeurism and unwitting participation.

Both Anna Murray and Campbell Patterson have used exclusively found material and while Campbell’s subjects, the media savvy Pamela and Tommy Lee, use and manipulate their public images, the unwitting subjects of Anna’s video installation, an anonymous Auckland couple are the opposite.

Anna’s work - Ferret’s Day Out - consists of 80 ten-minute VHS tapes of looped shots from a home video bought from an op shop. Each tape contains one shot from the original video, looped and slowed down with each repetition. This structure reflects the close examination the artist devoted to the found footage of a young Auckland couple from the mid 1990’s, as she obsessively constructed a narrative around the 1 hour 36 minutes of original footage. Gallery visitors are invited to share in this guilty voyeuristic pleasure and to appreciate the beauty of each moment as the video breaks down, once subjected to repetition and manipulation.

In Campbell’s work ’Pam and Tommy Lee Hardcore and Uncensored, Censored’ the artist uses a honeymoon video that he originally downloaded for the purposes creating a video work purely based on sex scenes. In the end he made the opposite as he became more intrigued by the Lee’s perversity in including the huge volume of non-porno footage.

Campbell’s video has been censored to feature no sex scenes but still includes sexual references and offensive language. Thus he has titled it ‘The PG rated version’
Campbell Patterson also includes some paintings in his installation, made from photos found on the website jokeemail.com. These are images intended for sending around offices or between friends, commonly ordinary snapshots or photo-shopped media images. Their shift of context gives them an eerie quality; again while the content is tame, they leave a lasting feeling of media perversion.