Gregory Bennett [New Zeland]
“Apokalypolis I” | video
venue: Seredyńskiego Str., backyard, entrance through Seredyńskiego 4 Str. gate
“Apokalypolis I” continues my exploration of intricately constructed virtual worlds populated by multitudes of de-individualized moving figures trapped in a form of uncanny life; bodies enacting a series of seemingly endless cryptic cyclic rituals, existing in a marginal state, neither dead or undead.
This work, conceived for projection onto an existing architectural setting, serves as a staging ground for a variety of both passive and active interactions between the figures and their often unstable or rapidly metamorphosing geographic and architectural settings. This is a world in constant flux, where time and space are ambiguous factors, and where elements are in state of persistent ‘becoming’, a state of both revealing and retreating.
3D animation software is utilized to order to realize these works, drawing on a range of representational traditions and influences from both art historical, moving image and popular culture sources where the multiplied body forms the primary subject.
Bennett’s animations use the synchronised movements of human forms en masse, running, stepping, bending, to create something akin to a corporeal architecture that is in perpetual flux. While they move over and around both utopian and dystopian built forms, the figures’ similarities of form, colour and gesture seem to constitute a structure all of its own which transforms space.
When this mass moves it does so as if with one mind, but it is not an automaton, it is a networked mind. They are colony-like; moving as individuals but seeming to share common purposes.
Gregory Bennett, currently a senior lecturer in Digital Design, School of Art and Design at AUT University, New Zealand, has a background in fine arts practice and moving image production and post-production. Bennett has received numerous awards and grants for his work and his “Utopia” series has been exhibited internationally including at TEMP Art Space in New York, the Lamar Dodd School of Art, Georgia, USA and screened also at ISEA 2102, Albuquerque, New Mexico, USA. His work has featured in public art exhibitions and at Auckland Art Gallery, TSB Bank Wallace Arts Centre, the Gus Fisher Gallery, Artspace, Experimenta in Melbourne and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Sydney. His work has been screened at film festivals throughout New Zealand and is represented in the collections of Auckland University, Chartwell and James Wallace as well as private collections in New Zealand and internationally.
