EXHIBITIONS / FOUR BY THREE

04.04.2012 to 26.04.2012

FOUR BY THREE brings together recent short films and videos by Virginia Hilyard. Utilising the possibilities inherent in moving image and sound through aesthetics, history, technology and the complexities of the natural world, Hilyards films and videos reflect a cinematic space that embraces past, present and future while working in the broader context of place and memory, contemporary art and landscape.

While some of these works have been produced from material gathered more recently whilst Hilyard was on residency in regional NSW, Paris and northern France, some material has come from the depths of the artists own archive, collected over the last two and a half decades.

Screening at Peloton are her contributions to Vol. 3, 4 and 5 of the artist film project ONE MINUTE and an excerpt from her latest work Room Tones (still in progress), which was produced during a residency in an 1872 miner’s cottage in Hill End, a former gold-mining town, northwest of Sydney.

Hilyard gathered domestic and natural audio field recordings and time-lapse Super 8 footage in the Hill End cottage rooms, gardens and surrounding countryside, with the aim of trapping both the unseen and unheard. She recorded ‘silences’ and spatial atmospheres – “that environmental sound of no sound that we call atmosphere”[1].

In making field recordings, Hilyard was conscious of liberating sound from the two-dimensional visual plane. The wild sounds and sonic textures provide a narrative to the world the viewer cannot see – that lying beyond the edge of frame. Room Tones explores this tenuous relationship - between reality and illusion, actuality and memory.

Click an image to view an enlargement