Image credit:
Ian Moore, ‘RG-01’, 2011, Acrylic on canvas, 610 x 610mm (each) (2)
Sam Trubridge
Night Walk – Bonneville
6th November – 9th December 2018
The Opening Night – Monday 5th November
Night Walk - Bonneville documents a performance on the famous Bonneville Salt Flats (Utah) in the haze of the 2018 California wildfires. This three-channel video work captures the work from several angles, exploring the interior and exterior views of a giant globe of disintegrating plastic.
Night Walk is a series of performance walks conducted as blind navigations in various locations, as part of the artist's ongoing study into nomadic states. The work maps the landscape through a negotiated passage through each terrain, by walking inside a large inflated sphere made from black plastic rubbish bags. As the journey proceeds, elemental forces and surfaces work at the thin plastic - thus transforming the confident architecture of the globe into a shredded artifact of the performance. On Bonneville Salt Flats there is a stark, alien quality to the work, invoking previous uses of the space for motor-racing and providing settings for science fiction films.
The work has also been performed in various terrains and conditions across Australia and Aotearoa NZ: including a reclaimed farming station (in collaboration with Culpra Milli Aboriginal Corporation), beaches, salt lakes, narrow city laneways, and busy high streets for exhibitions and events in Melbourne, Sydney, Northern Victoria, and Wellington.
Each walk is conducted as an act of blind passage, produced a dialogue with the terrains that it encounters. Surfaces, materials, spatial qualities, rhythms, and other movement systems are imprinted upon the fragile black membrane: a dark intrusion creating an alternative, non-linear, nomadic narratives in relation to landscapes. The condition of blindness reveals tensions between the body and the geological, geographic, cultural, technological, and architectural terrains that are encountered.
Interpretive Wonderings Symposium and Exhibition, Mildura Art Centre, Mildura (2015-16)
Performing Mobilities, RMIT and Margaret Lawrence Galleries, Melbourne (2015)
The Performance Series, 30Upstairs Gallery, Wellington (2016)
Migratory Wonderings, 107 Projects, Redfern, Sydney (2016)
Heat, Te Uru Gallery, Auckland (2017)
Pelagic States, Engine Room, Wellington (2018)
Check out the links below if you would like to find out more about Night Walk:
https://www.performingmobilities.net/symposium/passages_mobile/night-walk/
https://unlikely.net.au/issue-2/interpretive-wonderings
Biography:
Sam Trubridge creates performance artworks, installations, and performance design. He is the artistic director for the transdisciplinary performance company The PlayGround NZ Ltd, and The Performance Arcade: an annual festival of performance art on Wellington Waterfront. His performance and installation practice are characterised by extended collaboration across disciplinary boundaries-working with sleep sciences, free-diving, and on large-scale theatre productions and events as well as solo performances like Night Walk. Similar works like Sleepless I-III and Many Breaths have been presented in Aotearoa NZ, Spain, Brazil, Japan, The Bahamas, and the Czech Republic. Trubridge also writes regularly for Performance Research, ArtZone, TheatreView, and contributes to various publications worldwide on performance, scenography, and art practices.