Steaming Ties

George Egerton Warburton

Supported by Chartwell
George Egerton Warburton (1988, WA, lives in Melbourne) presents a trilogy of works for his first international solo show at Artspace.

An expansive mobile took over the main gallery, employed as a sculptural tool by the artist. The entity acted as a diagram in space, an almost autonomous being that fluctuated together with the ideas and things that are attached to it. To the extremity of one of its limbs a screen is suspended, which played Steaming Ties, a cinematic pan of a live chicken filmed in the artist’s studio. In the film, the animal shows its disinterest in the objects that have been arranged around it for possible interaction, while the soundtrack consists of the uncanny reproduction of a barking police dog attacking a burglar as heard over a CB radio in the artist’s kitchen.

Egerton Warburton’s works often take their cue from incongruous elements and ideas, which are both personal and affective, but which the artist is notably not in control of. A moral conundrum usually lies at the basis of his works: every time their ethical and aesthetic repercussions need to be considered.

On show were two video works that explored the arbitrariness of what we see, hear and feel. Why are you wearing athletic gear if you’re not playing any sport today? (2012) is an auto-reflexive film documenting the theft of a camera. In a single take, the footage escorts viewers past landmarks of Imperial Rome and sites rendered notorious in Italian cinema. In the film Boredom is a Desk With Legs in a Fish Spa (2012) the camera follows the protagonist, an aging man on a scenic farm, as he changes character eight times and delivers a script. His actions and emotions move in and out of sync, describing something other than what he articulates.