Edited from the artist’s ongoing collaborations with the Sahara desert during 2018, Shifting Point presents a surrealist video documenting a selection of private improvised encounters between Stewart and Desert. Each segment maps a varied set of conditions in sand, wind, light, heat, body and being. The work can be seen as part performance, part meditation, part illusion, part shared existence, part sweating under a satin bedsheet in 45 degree heat, part sandblasted eyeballs both human and camera.
Shifting Point uses visual metaphor to explore the interconnectedness and interplay between the environment and self. How insides respond to outsides and the murkiness of these perceived boundaries. The acted gestures in time and space explore the precarity of balance in environmental and personal landscapes, as well as the impossibility to ever solidify any state of being.
Shifting Point was first exhibited in 2019 as part of Backdrop, an exhibition produced in collaboration with Laura Delaney and Alanna Lorenzon at Counihan Gallery, Melbourne, Australia for Climarte Festival.
Shifting Point from Lisa Stewart on Vimeo.
Shifting Point: Speaking Sideways
Me in landscape, landscape in me.
Who embodies who?
I shift, she shifts. I shift, she shifts again.
Call and response. Me to her, her to me.
A temporary vacuum in which we find ourselves together.
Transmutations.
An interplay of matter.
Material. Inmaterial.
The visible and the unseen.
Solidity as an illusion.
Amorphous structures in motion.
I turn. I fall. One limb reorganising.
I move a community of cells in space and time.
On a stage that is both moving me and moved by me.
Where does one start and the other end?
Imaginary borders drawn at membrane peripheries.
Grains of sand in my ear. My foot in her dune.
Collapsing surfaces.
Rivulets.
The wind becomes visible in us both.
Blue black sundial keeping time.
Bodies of sand keeping time.
Casters of shadows blocking the sun. Absorbing the sun.
Temporary possessors of heat.
Skin cells perceiving signals they like to call 'very hot'.
Mind cells choosing uncomfortable feelings.
Sand cells up to their business.
Stillness in movement.
Stillness.
Still.
()
Inner is outer. Outer is inner.
A constant search for balance.
An equilibrium for right now.
From this point a new point must emerge.
Life-death-life.
We move in stages.
Cycling.
Full and empty. Up and down.
Left and right. North and south.
The micro and the macro.
Every atom searching for harmonics in the resonance of duality.
-LS 2018
