Newman featured in Erotographomania at CAST Gallery, Hobart
Andrew Newman has new work featured in the exhibition Erotographomania at CAST Gallery in Hobart, opening June 10, 2011 and running until July 10.
The exhibition curated by Sarah Jones makes parallels between the unconscious investment that artists make to address an audience and the intense erotic delusions played out in the exchange of love letters. Both produce a circuit of libidinal exchange that demands recognition. Both involve a fraught transferential displacement centred on an object of communication.
Love Letter by Letter (video still) 2011, two-channel video installation
Newman’s video installation ‘Love Letter by Letter’ painstakingly transcribes five years of correspondence between two lovers separated during the second world war. Each letter of the alphabet is represented by a corresponding colour and musical tone, and the letters are played back to each other on opposing screens, letter by letter. The viewer is immersed in the synesthesiastic archive of love as the abstracted letters sing to each other in an endless loop.
Not without an element of humour, Erotographomania explores pathos; the element of sadness and regret that flows between the ‘sender’ and the ‘addressee’ that becomes injected into the dubious presence of the world of objects; reflected there; contaminated by a past relentlessly regurgitated into the present. The exchange between the artist, the work and the audience remains confused and in flux, like that of the lover, the loved, the author and the intended beneficiary.