Bodies in Space

Richard Tuohy and Dianna Barrie

These  works explore palpably different dark room and camera based experimental techniques, yet together, reveal an abiding fascination: the movement of figures in cinematic space. We see bodies engaged in cinematic ballets of competing and co-operating movements-within-movements giving rise to sums and differences, superimpositions and interferences and presenting through the paths they trace, a novel articulation of space. On the screen, space emerges from bodies and bodies merge in space. 

All films screening on 16mm!

Richard and Dianna will also be doing a cinematic, film projection performance on  Sunday, 8 December, at RAW Art Space.

Valpi (2019)

8:00 mins, 16mm
Richard Tuohy & Dianna Barrie

A city of brick, tin and board, sliding into the sea.

Crossing (2016)

11:00 mins, 16mm
Richard Tuohy & Dianna Barrie

Across the sea. Across the street.  Cross processed images of fraught neighbours Korea and Japan in a pointillist sea of grain.

Pancoran (2017)

9:00 mins, 16mm
Richard Tuohy & Dianna Barrie

Jakarta traffic moves with the harmonious chaos of complex self organising entities everywhere. Through contact printer matteing techniques this mass transport becomes denser and denser until only the fluid futility of motion/motionlessness remains. Jakarta traffic stands as proof of the paradox of motion.

Blending and Blinding (2018)

11:00 mins, 16mm
Richard Tuohy

Screens and partitions; windows and shutters; grids, curves and arches.  Three peoples, one country: Malaysia.

Last Train (2016)

12:00 mins, 16mm
Richard Tuohy & Dianna Barrie

Found in the (now possibly lost) film archive at Lab Laba Laba, footage from a trailer for the 1981 Indonesian propaganda film ‘Kereta Api Terakhir’ (The Last Train) melts into a soup of chemigrammed perforations.  A film about the silence that follows the unspeakable; about blurred visions, untold histories and inaccessible archives.

Low Visibility (2019)

11:00 mins, 16mm
Richard Tuohy & Dianna Barrie

Workers of the word, in yellow vests, building other people’s dreams.

China not China (2018)

14:00 mins, 16mm
Richard Tuohy & Dianna Barrie

Hong Kong marked 20 years since its hand over; half way through the planned 40 year ‘one country, two systems’ transition.  Taiwan, once imperial China, once Formosa, now ROC on the edge of the PRC. Multiple exposures of street scenes distort space and place creating a fluid sense of impermanence and transition, of two states somewhere between China and not China.

Richard Tuohy (b. 1969, Melbourne) began making works on super 8 in the late nineteen eighties.   His films have screened at venues including the Melbourne IFF, EMAF (Osnabruck), Rotterdam IFF, New York FF, Ann Arbor and Media City and he has toured  Europe, the Americas and Asia presenting solo programs of his work. His works are firmly in the ‘hand-made’ film tradition. An advocate for the possibilities of hand made cinema, Tuohy has devoted much time and effort in sharing his knowledge through workshops and classes both in his native Australia and internationally.   

Dianna Barrie (b. 1972, Melbourne) found her way into filmmaking as a middle ground between the pursuit of abstract music and philosophy.  Ever pushing the limits of the hand processing of super 8 led to the establishment of nanolab with Richard Tuohy, and into the intersection of hand making and industrial cinema technology.  This exploration has spread beyond individual work to the establishment of Artist Film Workshop, where celluloid is embraced and advocated by a community of practitioners in Melbourne.