Sriwhana Spong: Channeling Mr B

Michael Lett is pleased to announce the opening of 'Channeling Mr B', an exhibition of new work by Sriwhana Spong comprising a film, Costume for a Mourner, and a hanging sculpture entitled Field Figures.

27 January - 6 March 2010

Costume for a Mourner re-imagines a dance from Le Chant du Rossignol, a ballet originally created for Sergei Diaghilev's Ballet Russes by Igor Stravinsky and his collaborator George Balanchine, based on the Hans Christian Anderson tale, The Nightingale.

Working from the only remaining artefacts of the ballet – the Stravinsky score, grainy photographs of the dancers and images of the costumes created for the ballet by Henri Matisse – together with strands of rumour, myth and anecdote, Spong creates a film both tragic and triumphant.

At once a dance of mourning for that which has been lost and a celebration of the synthesis between body, costume, image and movement, Spong's film is a reflection on the possibility of recording and transmitting history through an appropriated aesthetic or performative re-enactment.

Costume for a Mourner is accompanied by Field Figures, a sculpture comprised of two interlocking forms - the diamond and the circle. Influenced by the symmetry of Balinese offerings, Field Figures uses the weight and interlocked intimacy of these forms to hold colour correction filters used in stage lighting, photography, television and cinematography.

Borrowing its name from American choreographer Glen Tetley’s 1970 ballet, the mobile uses continual movement to depict balance as a constant state - like a dancer, it keeps strength and fragility, intimacy and distance, in perpetual harmony.

Sriwhana Spong was born in Auckland in 1979 of New Zealand and Balinese heritage. Since graduating from the University of Auckland Elam School of Fine Arts in 2001 Spong’s work has been exhibited throughout Australasia and more recently in the USA and Europe.

Exhibition opening preview Wednesday 27 January from 6 - 8pm.

Image: Sriwhana Spong, Costume for a Mourner, 2010 (still)

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