THE AMERICAN EXPERIMENT (2015)
The American Experiment is a new solo exhibition by Australian artist and filmmaker Amiel Courtin-Wilson. Representing a collection of expanded fragments assembled over seventeen years of filmmaking in the United States of America, the exhibition comprises moving image installation, audio recordings and diagrammatic endeavours to find new graphic representations of cinematic structure.
Solo Exhibition
Two Channel Video Installation, Photography, Sound Installations, Drawings
Gertrude Contemporary Art Space
Curator:
Emma Crimmings
Courtin-Wilson’s exhibition forms part of a new interdisicplinary research focus at Gertrude Contemporary on the ever-mutable documentary form. The American Experiment specifically explores the intersection of contemporary art and documentary film.
Of Courtin-Wilson’s exhibition, curator Emma Crimmings says:
“By bringing this category defying and often confronting moving-image work into the gallery, we hope to ignite new ways of interpreting and understanding the increasingly overlapping relationship between contemporary art and the documentary form.”
“Amiel Courtin-Wilson’s still and moving images evoke urban and social decay and anguish, but there’s an incredible softness and sensitivity to this arresting new exhibition. Elsewhere, there are audio interviews made with prisoners on death row, a towering grid of naive sketches from the artist’s notebook and a pair of stunning film works... Courtin-Wilson almost forensically examine two seemingly unrelated human subjects, his camera corralling and courting a man standing beneath a streetlight and a young boy in a gaming arcade via a series of shifting, sliding vantages. Among his fragmentary scenes and browbeaten settings, the artist unearths a clear and poignant humanist vision.”
Dan Rule, September 22 2015