The discpline of noticing…

Our environments may have been vastly different by comparison; Smith st and Carlton Cemetery but the collection of videos we captured were actually quite similar.
We looked over the content and found that we both found interest in decay, movement, inertia and symmetry.
Upon closer inspection, I realised that not only had Oscar and I collected similar findings but we had also framed our work similarly – creating compositions that complimented the surroundings.
As our media was collected in high traffic zones, we collected similar atmos; vehicles, wind, people, bells, horns, birds etc..

Labelled ‘a place of rest’, the noisy backdrop intervenes with the serenity of the gravesites.
‘Slowing down’ is difficult.
I sent Oscar  to the Lygon st boundary line where large cyprus trees once shielded the street from the tombstones, creating a sound buffer.
Now, it lay open and bare, exposed to the streets opposite.
Cars went by in droves, going about their daily routines – oblivious and focused on their paths.
Residential houses occupied the spaces opposite the graves – life as usual.
Trucks created a moving backdrop to the motionless gravestones in the foreground.
Flowers were laid on graves, looking more lifeless than broken grey stone, withered and weathered.
Graves that looked to have burst open, unprooted by trees nearby over the years passed – grotesque and haunting; it was easy to see why my mother would bring me here as a child to tell em ghost stories. They practically wrote themselves!
Trees that appeared forest-like, off in the background created a Tarkovsky-esque eeriness that rang truer to the themes of a graveyard in one of Oscar’s captures.
The natural backdrop almost appeared unnatural.

In Smith St, cyclists peppered the streets in bright colours as cars drove up and the intersection of Gertrude and Peel St.
Paint was in abundance, marking all surfaces, each and every one a new canvas.
Tags and graffiti; good and bad screamed abuse at passers by in bold, bright lettering – ‘SLUT’. No one seemed to notice.
Memes and pop culture references, motivational and inspirational quotes tagged blue stone curbs, rainbow painted walkways, all going unnoticed by passers by.
Textures and materials, paper paste-ups, large-scale murals, stripped paint and cracks in the architecture grabbed my attention.
It interested me the way in which street art differs from art we see in a gallery.
We attach meanings to artworks in galleries because they’re a) in a gallery and b) because they’re framed (most anyway).
It intrigued me how colourful this part of Smith street was and just how it all goes unnoticed.

As I already spend a great deal of time in this space already, usually dining out at Bowl Bowl for dumplings, or haunting Angelucci 20th Century, I had my habits and had overlooked almost all of the things that I had collected in my videos.
I had noticed however, the large murals and various tags on the record store and kebab shop.
Reflections were heightened and water movements in puddles in the ditches were overlooked.
Usually noticing people and their movements, I was drawn to people less in this exercise, looking at things instead.
Powerlines and the tops of buildings that I had seen but not really looked at filled the frame of my camera, creating shapes where there had not previously been any.

All the while I was noticing, I also noticed others noticing me.
I paused for long periods of time, capturing things of interest.
One gentleman interrupted one of my recordings to ask me what I was doing.

‘I’m just looking.’

Links to media:
Oscar: here
Lana: here