Incidental TV        

Nicci Haynes: Incidental TV

Exhibition

Exhibition Showing: 31 March – 3 June 2023

Public Program: Saturday 3 June

Exhibition Statement:

Incidental TV is an installation of screens arranged casually in the Gallery space. Each screen displays a short film or animation that are experimental, short and mostly created without following the narrative conventions of ‘film’. This makes for a hard-to-categorise genre: video poetry is perhaps apposite. And while I have been using the term ‘film’, often, I refer not to actual film but time-based sequences of images assembled from drawings and objects. 

It was finding a hoard of screens on a nature strip that lead me to conceive of Incidental TV as the next iteration of my ‘Peephole Cinema’ installation. Films in the peephole installation are viewed through small holes in cardboard boxes. This manner of viewing is intended to unlink viewers conventional expectations of ‘film’. The unexpectedness of artwork in grocery boxes or on abandoned screens turns everyday object into magic; an element of working with found materials that attracts me.  

The casual arrangement of old screens presents the work in the way it functions for me: as a form of note taking and observation, a stream of thought, or a set of experimental processes. As Jean Cocteau observed, “A film is a petrified fountain of thought.”  

Some of the work reflects my ongoing interest in language: miscommunication, misunderstanding and that which is deliberately confounding. Other work is purely experimental, a documentation of processes, such as ‘The Cost’, 2021 which is stop animation of images thermally printed on used receipts, or ‘The protester’, which is laser etched onto 16mm film stock and is the outcome of a 2022 residency at the ANU Makerspace. 

For the audience, the presentation of short moving images to be viewed in no particular order reflects the click-scroll-like-share manner in which moving-image is viewed on social media, and since those platforms are inclined to transience they become an outlet for me, which often influences the way the material is produced, not necessarily intentionally.  

Public program: Screening: AR and Experimental Animation

WHEN: Saturday 3 June, 6pm

FREE, Registration essential.

Join Nicci and a selection of her ANU film students for a presentation of a short program of experimental animations and AR vidoes.

Register here

About the artist:

Nicci Haynes first studied science at University College Cardiff, Wales, and then later visual art graduating in 2007 from the Australian National University school of Art, where she continues to work in various capacities in the Printmedia and Drawing Workshop. Based in Canberra, Haynes art practice ranges leans towards performance but includes print, drawing, artists’ books, awkward little videos and ‘mad scientist installations. 

Haynes has received many awards, including the Swan Hill drawing prize, M16 Drawing Prize, and a Canberra Critics Circle award for innovation and has work in collections including National Gallery of Australia and the State Library of Queensland. 

Nicci Haynes first studied science at University College Cardiff, Wales, and then later visual art at Australian National University. Haynes is based in Canberra and has an art practice that ranges widely with print, drawing, artists’ books, awkward little videos and crazy electronic constructions being variously brought into service as vehicles for her explorations. She currently works in the Printmedia and Drawing workshop at the Australian National University.