Interlude
,Gabriella Hirst
, 2017, single channel video, 6 minutes 39 seconds.Interlude is both the documentation of the artist’s performance and, as a looped, full-wall video installation, an enactment of the cinematic trope of the lone figure passing through a shrouded, uninhabited domestic space (specifically referencing this trope as seen in Ingmar Bergman’s 1951 film Sommarlek). Interlude depicts and performs a slippage between object and subject, as the audience member who confronts this installation performs completes the film trope, albeit momentarily.
Final Portrait
,Gabriella Hirst
, 2018, 16mm film, 4 minutes 54 seconds.Final Portrait of an imported plant, a night blooming cereus cactus which blooms just one night in the year- burnt into a synthetic retina to make it last a little longer.
Final Portrait
,Gabriella Hirst
, 2018, 16mm film, 4 minutes 54 seconds.Final Portrait of an imported plant, a night blooming cereus cactus which blooms just one night in the year- burnt into a synthetic retina to make it last a little longer.
Dearest Darling
,Gabriella Hirst
, 2018, 2 channel digital video with sound, 7 minutes looped.The tender conservation treatment of a 19th century romantic landscape painting of Australia's lower Darling river basin is paired with a series of filmic portraits of the Darling river today- a site subject to disastrous, irreversible ecological mismanagement.
Gabriella Hirst
website: www.gabriellahirst.com
instagram: @gabriellahirst
Artist's statement
Gabriella works primarily with video and performance, however her practice incorporates diverse methodologies and media including painting, ceramics, text and sound. Her works are project-based a rooted in research, treating research and durational activities such as gardening and star-gazing as both stimulus for poetic production and part of the production itself. Gabriella’s projects, although materially diverse, are unified by an ongoing interest in different societal and personal approaches to preservation and slippage. She is interested how one might adopt a romantic approach without complete surrender, testing the boundary between sincerity and skepticism.
In 2016, Gabriella was included in the NEW16 exhibition at the Australian Center for Contemporary Art in Melbourne and in 2017 was included in the Bloomberg New Contemporaries exhibition in London.