Dream Worlds Within Worlds

Lilypads from underneath, in ‘Gravity Be My Friend’ 2007, in the second roomOn Friday lunchtime some work friends and I wandered down to the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art to take in Pipilotti Rist’s exhibition I Packed the Postcard in My Suitcase. I’ve always been a bit sceptical about video installations since most I’ve seen make me yawn and move on fairly quickly (maybe I’m just impatient), but I went along with an open mind – after all, it takes us only five minutes to walk there. And unexpectedly I was blown away!

There are four rooms to wander through. The first begins innocuously enough, with a painting on one wall and an oval table in the centre of the room, set with an odd assortment of wine glasses and a peach and some cherries on a plate. Around the table are five unmatched chairs. There are two projections running simultaneously, one cast on the painting, and the other in the centre of the table. They are mesmerising, fluid, taking you from our world into the galaxies beyond, opening out like the petals of a flower worshipping the sun, or like a kaleidoscope. It was a long time before I could stop staring and go into the next room.

Take a seat and enjoy the show; ‘Laguna’ 2011 in the first roomThis large room has two projections on amorphous shapes suspended from the ceiling. Beneath them, in mirroring shapes, are padded mountains, contoured like a map showing the heights. I lie down and look up.

It’s our world, seen from below, literally because one is lying on the floor looking up at the projection, and because the artist has filmed the world from a camera that is always looking up, through endlessly moving water, through waving trees, past the limbs of swimmers. ACCA’s website puts it perfectly:

Lush and Edenic, sexy but sinless, the hedonistic pleasure worlds created by Pipilotti will delight, refresh and chillax you. Pipilotti’s vivid video environments take you into a dream state of elements. Earth, wind, fire and water are alchemically activated in her mesmerizing loops of trippy experience.

‘Administrating Eternity’ 2011; Chloe in the third roomThe third room takes you through a forest of semi-opaque projections, and the fourth into the mind of the artist herself.

The experience was fascinating, refreshing – we managed to spend almost our entire lunch hour there (it was hard to tear ourselves away), and I’m definitely going back.

If you’re in Melbourne, don’t miss it. It’s on until 4 March. 

‘Administrating Eternity’ 2011‘Administrating Eternity’ 2011; concentric rings of light projected onto the floor of the third roomA glimpse of the artist in ‘I Couldn't Agree With You More’ 1999; looking into the fourth room from the third