Merilyn Fairskye - Stati d'Animo
Merilyn Fairskye's artworks transform the spaces they inhabit. Using both still and moving imagery, she encompasses and engages the viewer with works that explore representations of identity, landscape and community.
Her latest body of work, Stati d'Animo, references the trilogy of paintings (1911) by the Futurist artist Boccioni that addressed the mixture of dynamism, chaos and anxiety that the development of the modern city of the early 20th century provoked. His work centred around the railway station.
In the 21st century the international airport replaces Boccioni's railway station as the principal site of human movement - of arrivals, departures and farewells.
In the black holes of international airports transient bodies dissolve in time and space. Through a series of still and moving videographs (as Fairskye describes these time-based images), Stati d'Animo continues with ideas around the contemporary world of global networks and connectivity explored in Fairskye's earlier work, Connected.
In Seconds, one component of the Stati d'Animo installation, each of the still images superimposes or maps the 25 frames of a single second of time that a video camera captures. These particular images were captured at Kuala Lumpur, Charles de Gaulle, Helsinki, San Francisco and Sao Paulo airports. A set of composite images, 9 Seconds, maps nine seconds of time at San Francisco International Airport in a concrete poem of time and space. 60 Seconds, the video works in this series, are in direct dialogue with the still images, emphasising the elusive space between past and future.
Merilyn Fairskye has exhibited widely both in Australia and overseas. Her artwork encompasses a wide range of media and methods from public artwork to video installations, films and photo-based works. She currently lectures in the Media Department at Sydney College of the Arts. Fairskye spent one month in Alice Springs as an artist in residence at the Araluen Arts Centre as a result of winning The 31st Alice Prize with her video work, Eye Contact. Merilyn developed Connected during this residency.