Over three decades of experimentation and familiarisation video has become an accessible and entrenched artistic medium for many contemporary Australian artists. Traditionally often drawing on humour and music, the relative ease and immediacy of video recording and editing technology also lends itself to performative works and a DIY aesthetic.
Using themselves as readily available subjects in their work, artists such as Anastasia Klose and Ross Coulter dramatise their own lives and surroundings. Others insert themselves into a TV or movie inspired form of heightened existence, as in Dominic Redfern’s Twin Share which begins benignly but quickly shifts into the surreal.
In the YouTube era of video sharing and the ubiquitous mobile phone camera, we know that video can document reality, but we are also aware that it can trick and exaggerate. Created in the city that is home to TV soap opera Neighbours and suburban satire Kath and Kim, the works in Melbourne Operatic are infused with a sense of humour and a touch of melodrama.