New work at Sydney College of the Arts Postgraduate Show
Andrew Newman is exhibiting the new video installation ‘ I um you I ah you I er you’ as part of his Masters examination exhibition at the Sydney College of the Arts. The work is a three-channel video installation that incorporates the colour and tonal alphabet that Newman has been developing. The work is in essence a composition of music and colour, a 21st century televisual colour organ, drawing influence from the colour/music experiments of eighteenth century scientist, Louis-Bertrand Castel, and his ocular harpsichord. Newman also expands upon William Burroughs proposition that we detach ourselves from word forms through substituting words and letters with other modes of expression, such as colour.
Newman, in this work, also contemplates love, and his theory of Pothos, where love, because it is shaped by language, is distinguished by absence. Newman believes we use language to mediate the distance between ourselves and the other. He defines this state of being as Pothos, a state where, instead of connecting to the other by touch, we attempt to connect by language.