Sera Furneaux
Video still from Smoked Salmon
Sera Furneaux ©1995
Renowned for single screen work, Furneaux's short video Smoked Salmon was recently screened at the ICA's Pandaemonium Film and Video Festival and her video Pleeeeeease Release me was shown at the Bluecoat Gallery as part of 1997 Video Positive Festival in Liverpool and Manchester. Her installation Kissing a video booth where the audience participates by taping their own kisses which are transferred onto a large screen for public viewing, was premiered at the Ferens Gallery in 1996 and having toured the UK, was recently shown in Germany as part of the European Media Arts Festival.
Furneaux is a tutor in Fine Art at the Ruskin School of Drawing Fine Art, Oxford University.
Sera Furneaux's recent works take apart the easy relationships between words, images and sounds, looking into the unconscious whimsy, humour and awe of everyday language. Her comedy is deadly serious, and her profundity profoundly whimsical. With enjoyment comes responsibility.
The most recent works look at the gestures we make everyday, in public, but not for everyone to see, like kissing and eating. Earlier tapes invited you to think: these ask you to participate, to perform, to join with others in a virtual world where creativity is the rule. The artist's work is not to make, but to make possible.
Sean Cubitt ©1997
Furneaux's Proposal for LAUNCH
The piece is designed to work in both urban and rural sites. The piece has two emotional states.
While watching the apparently uneventful space, the place suddenly starts a visual and sonic process of rapid change. This transformation process reaches a crescendo and then disperses, leaving the space with its present dis-usage.
At other times the piece will be gentler, with traces of the past emerging in the far recesses of the space, appearing on surfaces of different qualities, textures and materials, images and sounds scattered around in a fragmented manner.
Slices of histories - economic and sociological, both past and present - shifting and transforming through the medium of video, video that shimmers and hovers, remind us and make homage to a past history and possible future.