ARTISTS Kaleb Bennett, Damon Meade, VJ Rex, Johanna Sanders and Bek Coogan CURATOR Sarah Farrar

Wellington video artists draw on cinema history, parodying its genres. In That Last Moment, Kaleb Bennett reedits footage from the climatic face-off scene in Sergio Leone’s 1968 spaghetti western, Once Upon a Time in the West, adding an audio track to develop an atmosphere of tension and suspense. Damon Meade’s animation Habitation Probe (2004) is a sci-fi fantasy dreamscape, travelling through unknown terrain, searching for a place to settle. Continual movement precludes a sense of completion and rest.  Revelling in 1980s rock-star glamour, Johanna Sanders and Bek Coogan’s collaborative work Shera (2004) depicts a femme fatale (played by Coogan) screaming mutely at the viewer. In Cybernautic Dreamscape Release Candidate 10.b (2002), VJ Rex collages excerpts of 1960s sci-fi and western movies, genres predicated on white men discovering and conquering new territories. He sees his work as political, ‘colonising the coloniser, reclaiming territory’.