Please join us to celebrate the opening of VINYL, a new moving image work by Daniel Strang with a text by Campbell Patterson.

VINYL is a cinematic take on plunderphonics*, a crate dive through 100+ years of cinema history, culminating in an audiovisual composition made from 181 sampled films featuring gramophones/record players and the sound/music played within the shots. This tradition is playfully explored, taking the representation of vinyl/shellac records in cinema history, from Max Linder’s Seven Years Bad Luck (1921) to Ned Benson’s The Greatest Hits (2024), as subject.

VINYL is simultaneously a visual and aural sample employing a structural approach with chronological order of film release date determining the sequence of samples into a new composition. From shellac 78 rpm discs to 45 rpm vinyl records to 33 1⁄3 rpm LPs; from black and white film to colour and back again; academy ratio to cinemascope and back again; from celluloid to digital and high-definition video and back again. The records spin ad infinitum in the exhibition space as VINYL affords audioviewers a unique way of witnessing the evolution of both audio-playback technology and the cinematic medium.

Films sampled originate from Australia, Belgium, Canada, Finland, France, Germany, India, Indonesia, Ireland, Italy, Japan, Lebanon, Mexico, New Zealand, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Thailand, United Kingdom, USA, spanning genres as diverse as the Silent Religious Epic, Musical Biopic, Bollywood Action-Musical, Studio Ghibli Animation to the Italian Giallo. In this way, VINYL charts the rise and fall of vinyl records and their place in mainstream/popular culture, from ubiquity in living rooms, salons, and bedrooms to stalwart audiophile collectors, and re-birth with the vinyl revival of the 2010s.

Although sequenced chronologically, period films warp one’s sense of temporality, with the music playing within each of the sampled films often belonging to a different era to the one in which the film is set adding another layer of historic time. Consequently, a double recognition of film track and music track playing can trigger separate reactions/memories/associations. Additionally, by sequencing disparate clips via a form of cut-up technique applied to song lyrics and/or spoken word content, new meaning is playfully generated.

________
* “Plunderphonics, or Audio Piracy as a Compositional Prerogative” – as presented by John Oswald to the Wired Society Electro-Acoustic Conference in Toronto in 1985.

Exhibition opens: Thursday 7 November, 5.30pm, with refreshments by Liberty Breweries
Hours: 12 – 4pm, Tuesday – Saturday
Closes: Saturday 30 November

Daniel Strang is an artist, film editor and cameraman based in Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland. Taking a structuralist approach, Strang uses operations like accumulation and subtraction to make his montage-based video-artworks. A central concern addressed by his practice is the tensions between cinema history and contemporary art.

Since graduating with a Masters in MediArts in Moving Image from Wintec, Hamilton in 2008 he has been working in photography, film and video. Recent exhibitions include: Openings (Rm Gallery, Auckland, 2022), Event Horizon, curated by Jamie Hinton (Ilam Campus Gallery, Christchurch, 2016), Roadkill Cat Rug (Window, Auckland, 2015); HOSANNA! (Saint Kevins Arcade, Auckland 2012) and may I admire you? (1/155 Symonds Street, Auckland, 2010.)

Strang frequently assists artists with video production including: FAFSWAG, Tim Wagg, Sarah Smuts Kennedy, Mark Harvey and Jim Allen. He also collaborates with artists and galleries to create performance documentation and has done so in the past at: Artspace Aotearoa, Michael Lett Gallery, Te Tuhi Centre for the Arts and Te Uru Waitakere Contemporary Gallery.

Campbell Patterson graduated with a Bachelor of Fine Arts from Elam School of Fine Arts, Auckland in 2006. Significant solo exhibitions include: Notions, Michael Lett, Auckland (2023). toot floor, Hocken Collections Uare Taoka o Hākena, Dunedin (2018), call sick, Dunedin Public Art Gallery (2017) and Honky Tonkin’, Te Uru Waitakere Contemporary Gallery, Auckland (2015). Recently Patterson has undertaken residencies at the Headlands Center for the Arts in Sausalito, California at Gasworks, London in the United Kingdom.

Previously, Patterson was awarded the Frances Hodgkins fellowship in 2017 and the Parehuia Artists’ Residency at McCahon House, Auckland in 2015. He really likes to buy records and listen to music.

This exhibition opens alongside Proposal for a Body, an exhibition of noise, text, and performance markers by Jo Bragg and Georgina Brett.