Associação Cultural Videobrasil

Body in Motion

The clean technique of Shaun Gladwell's work—fixed and slow cameras, devoid of editing cuts or zooming effects—examines certain sports of urban cultures that take place in outdoor versus indoor settings. There is a constant appeal for meaning that reclaims the loss while claiming for the reconquering of public space, urban or natural, common to the landscapes of cities of all sorts.

Live collaborative performances are held at the exact location where the notion of groups and subcultures intersect, between the photographic still and the video. The artist's production, formal in a strict sense, portrays one single person, in a given place and at a specific moment of corporal activity.

His works disrupt exhibitions at art centers, biennials, and galleries by institutionally legitimizing the community lifestyle of skaters, bikers, and b-boys, previously confined to the circuit of migration from the street scene to the pages of fashion magazines or MTV music videos.

Dancing in the rain

In a recent perspective, Shaun Gladwell's Storm Sequence (2000) video plays a certain historic role: it was the first Australian piece of installation work to be auctioned. The fact that an anonymous collector has purchased the work in DVD, via Sotheby's—in Melbourne, in 2007—has made it into an indelible mark of the artist's presence, worldwide, and an icon of the vigor of Australian art at the turn of the century.

A harmonic, romantic painting about the deck of a skateboard, with Sydney's most popular beach, Bondi, on the background. Through rain-sprinkled lenses, Storm Sequence portrays the soft movements of a body that dances in equilibrium of maneuvers, in between peaceful images of a stormy ocean and skies, and the hard tarmac of the city that emerges amidst the vision of the beach. There is an indecipherable similarity with the footage of Hélio Oiticica as a dancer for samba school Mangueira, shot in Super-8 by Ivan Cardoso in the 1970s in Rio de Janeiro: bodies that dance asynchronously underneath the coats and parangolés, to the sound of old sambas and the Rolling Stones.

The work was selected for Robert Storr's Think with the Senses, Feel with the Mind programme, in the 52nd edition of the Venice Biennale, in 2007.

On two wheels

In Busan Triptych: Calligraphy & Slowburn (2006), a man gracefully performs radical manoeuvres on a BMX bike in an exhibition room. The perceived antagonism conforms, Eastern-style, the struggle between aspects of traditional culture (calligraphy in a museum environment) and a specific representative of contemporary urban subculture (the virtuoso biker doing his performance on two wheels in the middle of an exhibition). The absence of nature in the surroundings, free from any narrative structure whatsoever, leads us to look not at the calligraphy on the wall, but rather at the language of the lone biker who remains stranded in the strange context as he acrobatically weaves his movements in space. Nothing else happens, except for the insistently meditative action of the antigravity gesture, which is absolutely explored by the biker moving on his bicycle, with its elastic meaning, in slowed-down time. The street invades the museum. A copy of the video is part of the Videobrasil collection in São Paulo.

Repetition and meditation: double mirror

Erotic without being frantic, oscillating between silence and skate art audio, Double Voyage (2006) is the double-projection video installation commissioned by the board of curators of the 27th Bienal de São Paulo and produced locally in that same year. Presented as a double portrait, the piece of work is an investigation on individuals who push their bodies beyond their physical limits.

Performing in front of a set of buildings at the Ibirapuera park, duplicated by a huge mirror on the wall, side by side, the transsexual pole dancer Grace O'Hara, in constant motions of seduction, and skater Oggy de Souza, who maneuvers his skateboard in radical tricks with the aid of his torso and arms alone.

With Oscar Niemeyer's architecture as background, the installation gives a glimpse of the cruel sensuality of a night life of pleasures, combined with the urban perversity that so affects relationships of belonging in current days—this tough subject of difficult access to all.