robin kydd3
Grain still2

Robin Kydd

3 - 30 May 2010 in the Square² Gallery

ROBIN KYDD
3 May – 30 May 2010
Climb / Grain  2009
DVD
Duration: 3:22 minutes; 2:27 minutes both looped
Courtesy the artist

Two video works by Robin Kydd present performed interventions in the natural environment. Each involves a modest action which achieves dramatic results. These are home-made spectacles, akin to pre-computerised special effects. The works destabilise and undermine the physicality and seriousness with which they are executed, and the poetic, theatrical and comic potential of each is exploited to the full. Honesty is sought in the construction of an obviously artificial spectacle.

In Climb (2009) the artist scales a cherry blossom tree, wearing a light-suit which illuminates the branches and blossom as he climbs. The tree shivers and bows under his weight, and is by turns romantically, stagily lit, or recedes into near-darkness. Shifting the usually unseen off-screen lighting devices to the forefront, the viewer is at once audience and allowed behind the scenes. The artist ‘creates’ the tree as he goes, exposing and concealing its image through his actions.

The struggle itself...is enough to fill a man's heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy.          Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus

Grain (2009) follows a colossal ball off Plaster of Paris as it thunders its course down a steep basin hillside, corroding uncontrollably as it goes. The work enacts a Sisyphean mythic scenario; the burden which must be ceaselessly pushed uphill inevitably rolls to the bottom after each effort. A short hyper-real sequence set in a sun-gold meadow, Grain pays homage to stunt comedy, and evokes Camus’ reading of the myth as the contented realisation of the futility of existence. The artist writes, ‘Grain takes happiness in the absurdity of a task, and the destructive indulgence of a spectacle witnessed at the end of a day.’

Robin Kydd lives and works in Auckland. The artist graduated from Auckland’s Elam School of Fine Arts in 2009, completing a Masters in Fine Arts. His practice involves working between video, sculpture and performance.  Most recently his work has been exhibited at The University of Auckland’s Window (2010) and George Fraser (2009) galleries and TotalKunst, Edinburgh (2008).