Rosie Isaac <em>Minor Revision (Lab Accident)</em> 2022 (still); HD video. Courtesy of the artist<br/>
© Rosie Isaac

NGV X recess: Artist Film Program – Minor Revision (Lab Accident) Rosie Isaac

Free entry

The Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia, Fed Square

Community Hall Ground Level

Rosie Isaac <em>Minor Revision (Lab Accident)</em> 2022 (still); HD video. Courtesy of the artist<br/> © Rosie Isaac
Past program

Co-curated with Olivia Koh from recess – a Melbourne-based online platform showcasing contemporary moving-image works – this series will comprise daily screenings in Community Hall. Featuring all Melbourne-based filmmakers, the films highlight the city’s breadth of talent in art-filmmaking – an expanding arena of creative practice with a bright future.

Rosie Isaac is interested in art-making that imagines different material and social futures. Her research-based sculpture, writing and performance practice focuses on language as it is experienced in the body while reading, in relationships, and via social institutions.

Minor Revision (Lab Accident), 2022, explores the materiality of electricity as it is described through science, technology and embodied experience, in an attempt to dissolve the solidity of these categories. The video work challenges the dichotomy between the organic and the inorganic, considering how metallic elements are absorbed and used within the body and how our nervous systems function electrically. The work is part of a research project that explores how electrification has shaped social relations and political imagination.

In the film, small pieces of aluminium, plastic and the artist’s hair dance across a pink-hued backdrop under the influence of static electricity. Twenty-seven numbered texts appear sequentially, borrowing the form of a written ‘fill in the gap’ revision exercise. They begin by simply explaining the science of static electricity before making associative links to pollution, technology, plastic manufacturing and the body.

Isaac’s solo exhibitions and performances in Melbourne include eeeeeeeeeeeee at Flippy’s Gallery (2022); Intestine in My Eye at Next Wave Festival (2018); AGILE LIE at West Space (2017); and BACK WARD PLAY at Gertrude Glasshouse (2017). Recent group exhibitions include Person, Woman, Man, Camera, TV, curated by Chelsea Hopper and held at 99% and BLINDSIDE galleries, Melbourne (2022); Freedom of Sleep, curated by Anabelle Lacroix, Fiminco Foundation, Paris (2021); Reading Circles, curated by Rayleen Forester and Joanna Kitto for The Image is not Nothing (Concrete Archives), Ace Open, Adelaide (2021); and I Will Never Run Out of Lies nor Love, curated by Nanette Orly and Sebastian Henry-Jones, Bus Projects, Melbourne (2019).


Film credits
Minor revision (lab accident), 2022, HD video, 8 minutes 38 seconds, courtesy of the artist


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