Featuring work developed during a recent New York residence, Sriwhana Spong's installation Myth and Practice includes video, film and sound.

Faced with the impossibility of documenting the mythic proportions of the infamous Chelsea hotel, a cartridge of black and white Super 8 film was hand wound as the artist roamed the corridors. Losing the means of focusing allowed the air, or atmosphere, of this mythologised building to touch the actual film.?What is recorded is the dust of the machines used in the processing and transfer of this film. Featuring work developed during a recent New York residence, Sriwhana Spong's installation Myth and Practice includes video, film and sound.

Faced with the impossibility of documenting the mythic proportions of the infamous Chelsea hotel, a cartridge of black and white Super 8 film was hand wound as the artist roamed the corridors. Losing the means of focusing allowed the air, or atmosphere, of this mythologised building to touch the actual film.?What is recorded is the dust of the machines used in the processing and transfer of this film.Chelsea Hotel plays with the idea of documentation as a means of capturing something in order to name it and understand it, but in the end getting no closer to it.

The Birds is a sound work, created through the direct translation of an image of birds sitting on a telephone wire into a 21-second piano piece. It is scored by Godfrey de Grut, and interpreted visually by Kelvin Soh and Simon Oosterdijk of The Wilderness. The Birds takes a recorded moment and creates a piece involving collaboration, direct translation and interpretation.

Room 424 is a series of three photographs taken of what is, supposedly, Leonard Cohen's old residence at the Chelsea Hotel. Although the three images show the same door, what they describe is a process of capture and framing: with flash/without flash, long shot/close-up.

Sriwhana Spong
Myth and Practice
Opening Thursday 5.30pm, 30th October
New Zealand Film Archive, Wellington

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04/11/08