Sounds of Unridden Waves

Sounds of Unridden Waves is the inaugural exhibition held at Project8, a new artspace in Melbourne headed by curatorial duo Kim Donaldson and Sean Lowry, working as Cūrā8. Exploring the dispersion of authorial power amongst many collaborators – including the ocean – this immersive exhibition sketches out an array of speculative relationships between media, ideas, and people.

Surf culture is not likely to be the first thing you think of when you think of Melbourne’s art world. Perhaps this is precisely the interest of the inaugural exhibition at Melbourne’s Project8 gallery space, Sounds of Unridden Waves. The works primary creators, The Ghosts of Nothing – Sean Lowry and Ilmar Taimre – frequently work to “create new relationships between concepts and materials across a diverse range of media,” as they have it. Unexpected, radical, and speculative connections are their interests, along with those things which exist yet on the edge of what we might be used to calling “art.” The exhibition is fitting for the opening of Project8, which seeks as an organisation to promote discursive exchange through all of its programming. A special focus for the space will be partnerships between Australian, Chinese, and international artists and communities, with a view to “deemphasis[ing] differences.” The curatorium established for the space is another duo, comprised of Lowry and Kim Donaldson, who work together as Cūrā8. Both are artist academics, working at the Victorian College of the Arts.

Sounds of Unridden Waves  is made up of many elements: an immersive feature-length video work with accompanying soundscape, paintings, photographs, objects, musical works, and texts. Contributors across all of these media include Greg Huglin, Simone Douglas, Albert (Albe) Falzon, Ashley Beer, Ishka Folkwell, Jon Frank, Phillip George, Nathan Henshaw, Nathan Oldfield, and Monty Webber.

The film at the exhibition’s centre is billed as “the first feature-length surf film not to have any human surfers.” Instead, it is a hypnotic, psychotropic sequence of writhing ocean images. Occasionally, something recognisable as a break moves across the frame. Often, the video space is swollen with colour and movement which seems almost so of the earth as to feel unearthly – to eyes that aren’t used to it. The footage for the film was gathered on location in waters around Australia, Bali, Fiji, Hawaii, Iceland, Ireland, Portugal, and Tahiti, before being reconfigured into a non-progressive, speculative film sequence. The images are set to a spine-tingling soundtrack, and an embodied response seems especially called for given the multi-sensory presentation of works in the Project8 space. Perhaps it is more suitable to think of this work as set within the room, and within the sensory world that envelops us as we view it, than within any of the locations where the footage was gathered. 

An apposite choice for the opening of this space, Sounds of Unridden Waves will run until mid-June.

EXHIBITION 
Sounds of Unridden Waves
7 May – 18 June 2022
Project8, Melbourne