Curriculum Vitae – Jessica Scott

Jessie Scott is a video artist, programmer and producer who works across the spectrum of screen culture in Melbourne. She is a founding member of audiovisual art collective, Tape Projects, a preview panellist for the Melbourne Film Festival, editor of pictureskew.net, and has worked at the Australian Centre for the Moving Image in both the Digital Storytelling, and ACMI in the Regions community filmmaking programs.

EXHIBITIONS/SCREENINGS – VIDEO & INSTALLATION

Solo, Projects and Collaborations
2012   

• Speculation and Spectacle, Public Projection Event curated by Elisabeth Murray and Jonathon Brantley, Rogue Video, Brooklyn NY
• Odious Pegboard live av series, with Alice Hui-Sheng Chang, at Bouverie Studios
• Alternate, performance installation, West Space gallery with Alice Hui-Sheng Chang
• Death Watch, video installation, Screen Space gallery, Melbourne

2011   

• Alternate, Residency with Alice Hui-Sheng Chang, Today Your Love, West Space
• Olympic Doughnuts Video Stills, West Space Fundraiser 2011, West Space gallery
• Assisted Blonde, Dr Jekyll and Ms Flowerface, screening, 24Hr Art, Darwin, NT
• Olympic Doughnuts, Video Installation, Barkly Arts Centre Footscray

2010   

• Assisted Blonde, The View From Here: 19 Perspectives of Feminism, Group Show, West Space gallery, 2010 Next Wave Festival
• Future Fossils, sculptural works, Terra Interstellar, Group Show, Extended Play gallery

2009

• Gravity Pleasure Switchback, Video Installation, Frame @ Platform Artists Group, Campbell Arcade
• Check Your Tension, Video Installation, South, Group Show, First Site RMIT Submerged, Video Installation, Arab Telephone, Group Show, Platform Artist Group

2008   

• Vasili, Video, Exquisite Creature Video Totem Pole, Digital Fringe Festival

2007

• Silhouette, Animation, Geek Chic digital arts festival, Loop Video Bar

2006

• Debs, Video Installation, Feminist Actions, Spacement Gallery, 2006 Next Wave Festival
• Labours, Video Screening, This is not Video Art, Loop Video Bar

With Tape Projects Collective
2011   

• Life studies from the year 2030: A TAPR Collage Project, Platform 20 year Anniversary Show, Platform Contemporary Art Space
• The Fraternal Daughters of the Aurumic Order, with Tape Projects, Live Art Installation, Forum Theatre, Sugar Mountain Festival

2010   

• Lazy Slum, 3 Day residency/collaboration, Tape Projects and 6_a collective (Tas), Blindside
• The Results Are In- Documentation of 100 Proofs the Earth is Not a Globe, Incinerator Arts Complex, Moonee Ponds
• 100 Proofs the Earth is Not a Globe, Live AV performance with Tape Projects, Next Wave Festival

2009

• Her Veil No-one Has Lifted, Tape Projects Screening at Science Week, BMW Edge
• Her Veil No-one Has Lifted, Video Installation, 37 Proofs the Earth is Not a Globe, (with Tape Projects), 6_a Gallery, Hobart

2008   

• Flip/Lock & Exquisite Creatures, Installation with Tape Projects, Without Money There Is No Love Guildford Lane Gallery

2007

• Scratch, Site specific performance installation- with Tape Projects, Banana Alley Vaults
• Scratch Documentation screening, City Library

CURATOR/PRODUCER

• Committee Member and Curator, Videoways: The Australian Video Art Festival (2012)
• Mentor and Producer, Footscrayism, New Skin Program – Barkly Arts Centre, Footscray
• 100 Proofs the Earth is Not a Globe, Next Wave Festival 2010
• 100 Proofs the Earth is Not a Globe program of events, Incinerator Arts Complex, Moonee Ponds, 2009-2010
• Handwork: Maya Grinberg & Carla Grbac, Weaving (Textiles) Exhibition, The Landing @ OKOK, Sparta Place, Brunswick, August 2009
• Tape Projects Residency at Frame, Platform Artists Group Jul 2009
• Arab Telephone, Group Show, Platform Artist Group 2008
• Contributing producer/curator on Tape Projects DVD publication series, 2007-2009
• 123TV – Channel 31, Producer, experimental video and animation program, 2005-2007

GRANTS & APPOINTMENTS

• Lecturer, 3^rd Year Studio Practice, RMIT Media Arts 2011
• Panellist, Join a Gang, The Real Deal: Conference for Emerging Documentary, 2011
• Producer/Director, ACMI In The Regions, regional documentary project 2011
• Facilitator/Leader, ACMI Digital Storytelling program, 2010-2011
• Founding member of Tape Projects Audio Visual Arts Collective, 2007- present.
• Artist in Residence, New Skin program, Barkly Arts Centre, Footscray – Jan- Jul 2011
• Australia Council for the Arts – Skills and Development Grant 2009
• Wholphin DVD Publication- Internship, McSweeney’s, San Francisco, April 2009
• Melbourne International Film Festival Preview Panellist, feature films 2008- present

WRITING

• Contributor, Seventh Writing Project, 2011-2012
• Land Of Instant Forget – Catalogue Essay, RMIT Media Arts Grad Show, 2011
• Editor and Contributor, Picture Skew Blog 2011
• Portal – Catalogue Essay, Rachel Feery, BUS Projects 2011
• Sortie – Catalogue Essay, Claire Anna Watson, Blindside 2011
• Art and Play – Essay, Short Play DVD Publication, 2010
• Attraction/Repulsion and Video Art – Catalogue Essay, It’s not you, it’s me, Group show curated by Dominic Redfern & Clare Rae, Project Space 2011
• Extended program notes, MIFF Program Website, 2011
• Contributing Writer for Screen Machine, screen culture blog, 2010-2011

LINKS

www.vimeo.com/JessieScott – videos, documentation, sketches

www.tapeprojects.org – collective website

www.pictureskew.net – video/film/art writing blog

www.checkyourtension.wordpress.com – personal art documentation

EDUCATION

2000-2005

BA (Media Arts) with First Class Honours, Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology (RMIT)

 

 

Jessie Scott – Bio

Jessie Scott is a video artist, programmer and producer who works across the spectrum of screen culture in Melbourne. She has produced and programmed experimental video and animation in varied contexts over the past 6 years, including as a founding member of Tape Projects collective and as a Screen Events co-ordinator at the Australian Centre for the Moving Image. She is a preview panellist for the Melbourne International Film Festival, editor of screen art blog Picture Skew, and in 2009 completed an Australia Council funded internship in San Francisco with Wholphin DVD, a short film publication by McSweeneys press.

Her current video practice is primarily concerned with the construction of public place and memory, and with documenting sites of gentrification around her home town of Melbourne as it faces increasing population expansion and corporate-led urban development. Previous projects have been focussed on issues of gender performance, femininity and public identity. She has also worked as a community film making and art workshop facilitator and lecturer for the past 3 years, and community practice and ethos heavily inform her own work.

She has been exhibited locally at West Space, Spacement, Guildford Lane Gallery, LOOP, ACMI and Platform Artist Group,  interstate at Six_A Gallery (Tas), in the 2010 Tiny Stadiums festival in Sydney, and internationally with Rogue Video in Brooklyn.

Independently, and with Tape Projects, she has curated screenings, exhibitions and programs at events and venues as diverse as Barkly Arts Centre (Footscray), Incinerator Arts (Moonee Ponds), Platform Contemporary Arts, Melbourne International Arts Festival, Nan Hai gallery (Taipei), Digital Fringe, Bouverie Studios and The Big Screen at Federation Square. In 2011 she was part of West Space gallery’s inaugural Today Your Love Program with a residency and live show entitled Alternate, and in 2012 she will have a solo exhibition at Screen Space gallery in Melbourne.

Olympic Doughnuts – Artist Statement

To give a complete history of the contents of my room would take a lifetime. You might like to consider what is involved in preparing a history of a large city.

From “A Tour of Footscray” By V F Bristow, 1981
Held at Footscray Historical Society

Guy Maddin’s surrealist personal narrative film, “My Winnipeg”, makes an impassioned case for the preservation and reverence of local culture via profiles of the great, lost buildings of his home town. Winnipeg, the film argues, may not be of any interest to anyone except the people who live there, but neither is it required to be. These mundane buildings are first activated by his personal memories and recollections, and their meaning metastasized by the implication that countless other individuals have been forming their own personal attachments & associations to these places, casting them in their own personal dramas (as back drop, central protagonist or bit-player) in much the same way for generations. The accretion of this type of cultural capital, it is concluded, can only happen over time; but so can be lost in an instant. Bricks and mortar can only be animated in the minds of the people to whom they mean something – and this meaning (or meanings) cannot be predicted or imposed by town planners or architects alone. They belong to the people. The people in effect, invent them.

When these types of places – be they town halls, local businesses or sports grounds, are lost – a part of the culture is lost forever. Every swimming pool, marketplace, café or public housing facility to be demolished, takes with it the intangible strands of local lore and tradition that a public place helps to focus and knit together into something coherent.

Despite our seemingly endless sprawl, you can’t actually rebuild Melbourne next
to Melbourne- when a new building is erected, it must be written over what stood before. As such, Footscray is at an interesting cross-roads. Being the gateway to the expanding and gentrifying West, it is yet a very old town, with multiple layers of its various histories still exposed- which have not yet been written over by “progress”. It is facing a complex choice: the opportunity to shape a new future for itself, embracing visionary urban projects which define new ways of living in the city. But with this opportunity comes the risk (or certainty, in fact) of an equal amount of loss, and marginalization of what existed before.

“Olympic Doughnuts” impassively records the comings and goings of a range of sites around Footscray which have either already been, or are in danger of being erased in coming months, years or even days. It takes a moment to contemplate local civic treasures, both past and present, and the many simultaneous histories being written and re-written daily, as Footscray slowly groans towards gentrification. Placing it within the old Barkly Hotel site, now home to the constantly threatened Lentil As Anything, as well as an innovative, low-rise social housing complex, and the Barkly Arts Centre, puts it right at the heart of this juncture.

Depicted: Olympic Doughnut, Forges of Footscray, The Royal Hotel, The
Buckingham Hotel, Franco Cozzo, Footscray Market, Apartments on Barkly Street under construction, Footscray Train Station, Fiesta Bingo Hall Sign.

Footscrayism

Footscrayism, a set on Flickr.

Footscrayism Part 2

Of course, apart from my own videos, there was a huge body of work produced by the participants I worked with, namely: Johanna Lafferte, Josh Howie and Billie Whitbread. With varying levels of experience, but buckets of talent and creativity, they were a great group to work with- open-minded, responsive and really keyed into their community.

The photos they produced were ace and there is some documentation above, and the text from the floor sheet below.

Footscrayism
Josh Howie
Johanna Lafferte
Jessica Scott
&
Billie Whitbread

Created over six months, using digital cameras, polaroid film, video and paint, these works together form a multilayered portrait of Footscray, drawing strongly on each artist’s personal relationship to the people and places around them.

Each participant volunteered to be part of the project, meeting regularly and taking their cameras out with them on the street to try and capture their own vision of Footscray. The period of the project turned out to be a tumultuous time for Lentil as Anything: a period of uncertainty, transition and ultimately resilience, which is reflected in the work.

A Footscrayism is something both dark and light, bitter and sweet, funny and tragic, and strong and fragile all at the same time. It embodies, rather than pays lip service to, words like community and diversity – here, where they are every day realities, necessities, facts of life.

Footscrayism is an outcome of the New Skin Artist in Residence program at Barkly Arts Centre, 2011.

We would like to acknowledge the generous support of Rae & Bennett Fine Art Printers

Footscrayism Part 1

For the first half of 2011 I had the pleasure of being an artist-in-residence at Barkly Arts Centre in Footscray, one of three artists part of the New Skin Program. It was a really enjoyable, responsive program where I was able to get to know people, spend time in the community researching and allow a project to evolve naturally. I loved hanging out at Barkly, at Lentil As Anything, wandering around Footscray with the artists I worked with looking for inspiration, visiting the incredibly quaint Footscray Historical Society to find out more about the Barkly Hotel, shooting on the street, collecting bits and pieces of Footscray ephemera and most of all: eating Olympic Doughnuts on a regular basis.

One of the over all goals of the program was to engage with residents and community members who live in/work for/use the facilities in the very unique (and visionary) social housing development in which the art centre sits. I worked with three emerging artists who work at Lentil As Anything, the community’s erstwhile town square, and we produced an exhibition in June called “Footscrayism” which focussed on different modes of portraiture- of people, and places in their community. I produced two videos for the exhibition, one of which I have posted an excerpt of here, as well as accompanying essay.

This residency, the work that came out of it and the people I worked with have strengthened my resolve as an artist- given me a really clear sense of the kinds of projects and work I want to be a part of. Showing work at Barkly was unlike any exhibition I’ve ever been part of. Seeing the effect the work had on the audience- whether they were deeply moved, delighted, slighted or downright angry, made me think a lot about the relationship between art and audience. This audience were so invested in the outcome of the work. It meant a lot for them to be represented in this way, and they held us to a high standard, had high expectations.  The question “Who am I making this for?” has always troubled me. I don’t think there is any one answer to this question – I in fact don’t believe art has an inherent purpose. But I do know that art means more to me when I can feel the connection with the audience I am presenting it to. And it feels awful when I can’t.

____________________________________________

An interview with Richard Tuohy and Marcia Jane from Artist Film Workshop

My sister, Maggie Scott, interviewed Richard and Marcia as research for her report on the most recent Artist Film Workshop, at Bouverie Studios in March. The report will be available on Screen Machine shortly.

An interview with Richard Tuohy and Marcia Jane from Artist Film Workshop

By Maggie Scott

Maggie Scott: Why is it important to you to salvage the practice of using the film technologies you do in this age of hyper en masse digital film craziness?

Richard Tuohy: Well that is a key question for what AFW are about. In some respects we are motivated by ‘salvaging’ – there are still games to be played with film – still ideas to be discovered and played out. Film still offers new insights into the world and itself. That much is a salvaging, or at least a continuation of the film art tradition. But what film is changes too. Now, film is a much more hands-on thing. As film equipment is dropping in value, it is now more than ever able to fall into the hands of artists to play with. We can now get our hands on gear that a little while ago was way too expensive and only the domain of the film industry. This is new, and has changed what working with film means. In part, the internet is a factor in this change too, as it has made it easy to get your hands on equipment. A very important factor for AFW is that while digital is everywhere and anyone can shoot and edit on their own computer, film requires a bit more effort. People often need help to use film, to learn how it is possible to work with film. That is a core mission of AFW. We want to make it possible for artists to work with film. And we want to create a context where work made on film is prioritised, such that it makes sense to work on film.

Marcia: I tried my first video art making while I was studying multimedia in 2003. I used what was available to me as a student, and at that time it was very definitely digital video. Had I studied at an earlier time I would have been handed a Bolex camera and would have explored film first. But using what I had, I began to delve into the textural possibilities of shooting on DV, and I know from this that every shooting medium has its own textural qualities that are ripe for exploration. So I don’t subscribe some popular positions on film, for example that it automatically looks better than video. Materiality is an interesting aspect of film, but immateriality is also an interesting aspect of video.

As a digital video maker who has recently begun to work with film projects, I see it as an opportunity to work with images and time in a very different way. I generally do ‘direct film’ and this is because of my ongoing interest in drawing and collage. Film offers a drawing surface. After the drawing is done the film strip is run through a projector. The mechanism of claws and shutter perform a mechanical division of the drawn images, sequencing them and converting them to moving image. I’m still figuring out how this works but I think there are ways to do this that will be interesting. I also make video recordings of my films that I project at home, and these images are making their way, via a series of optical and digital procedures, into my video installations.

Is this activity really salvage? You do have to salvage gear that is often on its way to being thrown out, quite literally it could be in a dumpster. And film requires you to have a series of devices in order to make a work, from tanks, chemistry and racks to splicers, winders and projectors. This is a very different way of thinking from using software to make work; you need some knowledge and access to a different set of (mechanical) resources, and that knowledge and gear base is shrinking.

Film as a nostalgic activity does not appeal to me at all. In so far as time travels in any direction, it’s forward, not back! I see film’s potential now (in 2011) for multi-practice artists. I’m talking about artists who make sound, movement, visual, spatial or moving image works, making hybrids of these as they wish. Film becomes another strand, another mode of expression in this mix. These type of artists are the ones who will bring interesting thought to the medium of artists’ film.