Sagittarius/Domain + Prelude

Sagittarius/Domain + Prelude is a dual-channel video installation commissioned for the exhibition Shaun Gladwell: Stereo Sequences in 2011.

Sagittarius/Domain + Prelude sits in an enclosed room, two screens facing each other on opposite walls. In both, a lone figure tracked from behind – the camera employing a classical point of view, mimicking the work of Caspar David Friedrich – descends into a subterranean passageway. For the viewer these figures act like avatars, our perspective being theirs, one moment behind.

On the first screen, Sagittarius, a figure moves tentatively through a warren of dark, damp caves and tunnels in the Wollemi National Park carrying a bow and flaming arrow that lights the way. The figure’s movements are captured on infra-red camera – a night vision system Gladwell also used in Double Field (2010) – the otherworldly landscape of the cave system caught in greenish tones. The footage is grainy and raw, only hinting at the richness of the ecosystem hidden deep inside the earth.

On the second screen, filmed in the underground in the Domain in inner Sydney, is a skateboarder propelling himself down a travelator (once famously the longest travelator in the world). The natural world in such abundance in the Wollemi caves is overwhelmed by the concrete and metal of this man-made tunnel. Yet there is a similarity in tone, the fluorescent glow of the travelator scene shedding a similar light to that in the cave sequence. The skateboarder uses his hands to propel himself down the travelator until the power of gravity takes over, assuming a fixed position, hands and legs held out to the side, to stabilise his descent.