Sounds of Unridden Waves at Project8
7 May – 11 June 2022. Opening 6 May 2022, 6–8 pm
Project8, a new contemporary art gallery on Collins Street in Melbourne’s city centre, opens on 6 May 2022 with Sounds of Unridden Waves by the Ghosts of Nothing (Sean Lowry and Ilmar Taimre), a fictional band formed in 2014 to perform a collective artist function in the contemporary artworld. Sounds of Unridden Waves is a major new work developed over a three-year period by the Ghosts of Nothing in collaboration with leading artists and filmmakers.
The scope of this project is unusually wide-ranging. The exhibition consists of an immersive video installation, presented together with a constellation of paintings, photographs, scholarly texts, original musical works and related objects. This dynamic artistic model is located at the blurry borders between content origination, composition, collaboration, remix culture and curatorship. Such an approach, although widespread in popular music, is still largely uncharted in visual art.
Sounds of Unridden Waves is a heavily collaborative project, with an inclusivity and openness rarely seen in art film contexts. The central video and original soundtrack components were conceived and produced by the Ghosts of Nothing, who also edited, animated or ‘remixed’ all other visual elements. The source footage used in the film was captured by principal cinematographers Greg Huglin and Simone Douglas, with additional contributions from Albert (Albe) Falzon, Ashley Beer, Ishka Folkwell, Jon Frank, Phillip George, Nathan Henshaw, Nathan Oldfield and Monty Webber.
The accompanying exhibition of images and objects has been developed by the Ghosts of Nothing in close collaboration with New York-based Australian artist Simone Douglas. It also features works that are remixes of images contributed by renowned filmmaker Albert Falzon (director of Morning of the Earth) and Sydney artist Phillip George.
Sounds of Unridden Waves is the first feature length surf film not to have any human surfers. The film component was shot on location in Australia, Bali, Fiji, Hawaii, Iceland, Ireland, Portugal and Tahiti. The source footage was then radically reimagined and set to an epic original soundtrack by the Ghosts of Nothing. The three-part extended soundtrack album for Sounds of Unridden Waves is available on all major steaming platforms.
A sublime audio-visual response to the many moods and textures of the sea, Sounds of Unridden Waves unfolds as a series of speculative journeys across time and space, set within a romantic and content-saturated psychotropic universe. Glimpses of surf breaks are occasionally recognisable, but the specific time and place at which Sounds of Unridden Waves is located is deliberately ambiguous. The majesty of the ocean dwarfs the viewer. Each successive wave and accompanying wall of ambient sound work together to build a quasi-narrative strangeness and posthuman otherness that is at once uncannily familiar and strangely alien.
About Project8
Project8 is a new contemporary art space in Melbourne’s CBD dedicated to promoting speculative poetic and material innovation through exhibitions and related events. It utilises the multimodal aesthetic languages of contemporary art to experientially deemphasise differences and contestations grounded in language, politics and culture. Project8 is committed to the promotion and development of discursive exchange, collaboration and partnerships between Australian, Chinese and international artists, researchers and communities actively engaging with contemporary art.
Project8 Gallery
Wurundjeri Country
Level 2, 417 Collins St.
Melbourne, VIC
AUSTRALIA
