Alex Monteith: Composition for farmer, three dogs and 120 sheep
https://isea2008.wordpress.com/2008/07/27/807/
Title:
- Composition for farmer, three dogs and 120 sheep
Artist(s) and People Involved:
Filmmaker, Video Artist, or Animator(s):
Symposium:
Venue(s):
Creation Year:
- 2006
Medium:
- Four channel video, sound
Duration:
- 18 minutes
Art Event Overview:
Alex Monteith’s Composition for farmer… tweaks an archetype of agrarian New Zealand, so often described as a nation of 40 million sheep and 4 million people. In the crisp air of a Taranaki farm, Lloyd Bishop, a champion New Zealand dog triallist, expertly choreographs three dogs and 120 sheep across the viewfinders of Monteith’s four simultaneously recording video cameras. The once-primetime television staple of sheepdog trialling, where farmers and their dogs compete to usher a mob of sheep through a course and into a pen in record time, becomes in Monteith’s video installation a pattern of animal and human bodies. There is nostalgia for an imagined rustic innocence, contradicted by the muddy specificity and the fantastic pointlessness of this choreography. Formally, the work draws a relationship between the rigid framing of the camera lens and the pegged arenas the sheep move between. This work evokes nationalist, multi-screen hymns like This is New Zealand, a celebration of culture and landscape that screened at the 1970 World’s Fair in Osaka.
Additional Images:
Image of "Composition for farmer, three dogs and 120 sheep", previously shown in 2006, from the catalogue
