Cirrus@Austlit

Contextual Statemant : Essays on Earth: Linear A is an interpretation of a multimedia exhibition by the artists Brodie Ellis and John Wolseley, based on Earth, Air, Water, Fire (2022), a series of ‘verse essays’ by the American poet Paul Kane. This immersive exhibit (to be staged at the Bendigo Art Gallery) projects moving images of Wolseley’s painting and Ellis’s photography on the gallery walls while a recording of the poem plays simultaneously, the arts forms interweaving and in-flowing together as one—like, in Ellis’s words, ‘a mountainous Japanese scroll slowly unraveling.’ The paintings and sculptures will be shown in two gallery spaces leading to a third gallery devoted to the video installation. The Axon presentation here—a two-dimensional rendering of this project—stands as an invitation to deep reading and, by extension, deep seeing. Like all such endeavors, it is intended to elicit a process of kinesis, whereby the viewer/reader responds to a stimulus with emotional and intellectual activity that is as much subconscious as conscious, seeking to complete the arc of the work in more than three dimensions: as if time were suspended in an imagistic flow that enwraps one, moment by expanding moment.