Creative Suite is the latest in our Square2 series, City Gallery's site dedicated to moving image artworks located at the gallery's main entrance. 

Recalling Marshall McLuhan’s famous dictum ‘the medium is the message’, Creative Suite brings together a selection of works that explore various communication technologies as both medium and subject. 

Nicholas Mangan’s Some Kinds of Duration (2011) traces a number of genealogical links between the architecture of an ancient Mayan palace, Sydney’s now demolished Pyrmont Incinerator, and the Canon NP6030 photocopier. The formal links between these objects and Mangan’s archival research are evoked through the geometric patterning and photocopier-like action of the work. 

Agatha Gothe-Snape’s ongoing, open-ended POWERPOINTS series (2008- present) explores the artistic potential of the ubiquitous software programme. While Fast Meetings, Fast Feelings (2012) relies simply on raw colour and sound effects, Empty Gestures (with Sarah Rodigari) (2013) evokes the more familiar, didactic use of PowerPoint to document and communicate the thoughts and dialogue fundamental to her artistic practice—recording verbatim excerpts of a day-long conversation with artist Sarah Rodigari about the value of participatory art. 

Joshua Petherick’s practice explores the production, reproduction and mutability of images across a range of media, including collage, video and sculpture. For his work in Creative Suite, Petherick has filmed the operation of a flatbed scanner through an iPhone camera, capturing fragments of minuscule detritus from a dirty apartment. The resulting conversation between these two devices folds the technological gaze in on itself.  

Greatest Hits’ Untitled (2012) draws on the recent controversy surrounding the Kim Dotcom raids to further explore questions around copyright, ownership and piracy in the Internet age. By remixing police helicopter footage of the raids with stock aerial footage of night-time Los Angeles sourced from the internet, their work directly situates the politics of these debates within artistic practice.

Creative Suite is guest curated by Andrea Bell, an independent writer and curator currently based in Brisbane. 

*image (left)
Nicholas Mangan,
Some kinds of duration, 2011 (stills).
HD video, black and white, sound, 5:25 mins, looped.
Courtesy of the artist and Hopkinson Mossman