GALLERY 1 & 2 : APR 11 – 26 ‘Intentionally left blank’ by Matthew Sleeth curated by Guest Curator Kirsten Rann
Matthew Sleeth has just returned to live and work in Melbourne after years of living in New York. So here is an excellent opportunity to see an update of his always intriguing multi-disciplinary oeuvre. Apart, that is, from his video I don’t see God up here (2010) which featured in the National Gallery of Victoria’s major Melbourne Now exhibition and his billboard, a part of the Pattern Recognition public art project that Melbourne International Arts Festival commissioned in 2008 and which remains installed across the front of Melbourne’s Hero Building in Russell Street.
Interesting are the connections between this still active billboard, the Melbourne Now video and his current exhibition – Intentionally Left Blank – installed at Footscray’s Trocadero Art Space. In all three we witness Sleeth’s ongoing concern with the notion of an “All Seeing Eye” – whether it be the presence of surveillance cameras or the possibility of some greater Eye in the Sky watching us all. Could it be God, or is it an Orwellian Big Brother watching us from satellites, bank automatic teller machines (ATMs), mobile phone cameras of friends or strangers and any number of technological visual recording mechanisms – which now increasingly includes drones – that can trace every move we make every hour of every day?
In Sleeth’s case, whose oeuvre started with photography, it’s his engagement with mechanical reproduction that underpins his practice, whether it be about what a lens captures with him pointing and shooting at a subject/object or by indirectly placing the viewer behind or in front of a camera and provoking them to ask questions about how photography/recorded imagery can be used and for what purpose…
In Intentionally Left Blank, Trocadero’s main gallery is installed with three 3D-printed surveillance cameras – one on each of three walls – that point into the gallery where viewers will stand. The fourth wall is blank but for a small sticker that contains the words “intentionally left blank” – words often found printed on blank pages in exam papers or legal documents to avert confusion or panic. In the second smaller gallery, a series of tiny human figures are set out close to the floor and under a row of tiny LED lights. Resembling the roadside lights that appear at night, this “scene” completely inverts the position of the viewer from where they were in the previous gallery; from viewed subject they become the all-seeing “Eye in the Sky” – and hence Sleeth’s choice to use figures that appear so small.
As so happens, the date of Sleeth’s exhibition opening for Intentionally Left Blank – the 12th of April – is the same that, in 1961, Russian cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin was the first human to travel in “outer space”. It is alleged that, while circling the earth, he said: I don’t see any God up here – the title of Sleeth’s aforementioned 2010 video. By playing with the position of the viewer in this exhibition – from viewed subject in front of the camera to the Gagarin-like “all seeing eye” behind the camera – is Sleeth alluding that our own level of technology has put us in the position of God? Some questions need to be asked: what responsibility comes with being placed in this position? How do we address the increasing surveillance that is being used in both public and private space today? Is it really for our safety, as we’re told by its major users – governments and corporations, or is it used for other purposes? And what could – or will – these be?
