HYBRID COLLABORATION

Hybrid (2022)

Hybrid is the result of a Vacation Research Scholarship, undertaken by contemporary artists Lauren Downton, Kaitlyn Davison, and Sally Craven at the University of South Australia. Anchored in spontaneity, play, and the unexpected, it reflects a culmination of collaborative and individual works. Exploratory and visceral, the resulting exhibition represents a hybrid of the artists’ practices. Drawing on inspiration from the rich and dreamlike textures of Andrei Tarkovsky’s 1979 film Stalker, this exhibition explores the notion of ‘haptic visuality’ – the relationship between visuals and our senses of touch. Sensory experiences such as touch, sound and smell are embedded into memory and the fabric of everyday life. Academics Marks and Polan investigate how ‘nonvisual knowledge, embodied knowledge, and experiences of the senses, such as touch, smell, and taste’ bring physical senses to the forefront during visual experiences (Marks & Polan 2000, p. 129).

They state: ‘Haptic perception is usually defined by psychologists as the combination of tactile, kinesthetic, and proprioceptive functions, the way we experience touch both on the surface of and inside our bodies … in haptic visuality, the eyes themselves function like organs of touch’ (p. 162)… ‘Using vision as a sense of touch, we brush the image ‘with the skin of [the] eyes’’ (p. 128). Investigating these insights, Hybrid embraces the act of collaboration as a transformational force. Musician Ann Farber describes the art of collaboration as ‘voices and structures [that] keep weaving in and out, modifying and reshaping one another (Belgrad 1999, p. 2).

(Words by Lauren Downton, 2022).

Photos by Lauren Downton

References

Belgrad, D 1999, The culture of spontaneity : improvisation and the arts in postwar America, University of Chicago Press, Chicago.

Marks, L & Polan, D 2000, The Skin of the Film: Intercultural Cinema, Embodiment, and the Senses, Duke University Press, Durham.