Artists statement

'Collider' is a video site-response work that investigates the physical and conceptual notions of Bundoora Homestead Art Centre and surrounding Bundoora Parklands as matter, memory and phenomena. The project spanned three years of the artist’s life, visiting as both a local resident and an exhibiting artist at the Centre, involving a long-term process of “mapping” the site. The work looks to make visible, the hidden frequencies embedded within the buildings and parklands, including the social and geological. A complicated space, once a volcanic vent (Mt Cooper, 9.5 million years ago), home to over 60,000 years of continuous First Australian culture, long-term indigenous and (recent) settler land use, a place of respite for returned soldiers; visitors today generally experience the site as a place of leisure. Collider aims to disrupt this view, asking the viewer to look below the surface and experience a deeper sense of place. Using video sequences, this work places the Bundoora Homestead site within a shifting scale of material territories, molecular energies and entropic disorder. Collider includes both abstracted and live video sequences shot throughout the Homestead grounds and across the Bundoora Park and Mt Cooper area that appear to be capturing unknown, signalling phenomena. Time flowing and dissolving across the landscape.

Historical information

"My practice sits within an expanded notion of landscape photography, combining video, photography, sound, installations and site responses. I’m interested in the idea of landscape as a transmutable zone where the unseen forces of the material world interact with embedded layers of time and history. Projects revolve around site research, science fiction/fact, the weirdness of ecologies and the realities of quantum matter. I try to represent what is sensed rather than understood, through both observational and uncanny visualisation. Using investigative material processes to make images (scanners, camera-less photography, digital/analogue manipulation, motion graphics) I attempt to question or disrupt the way others can view an image. This material approach is key to how and why I work. With 22 years experience in gallery-based exhibitions, art fairs and site specific/responsive projects, I have participated in over 50 exhibitions including projects for: Dark Mofo, Northern Centre of Contemporary Art, Testing Grounds, Charles Sturt University Gallery, Bargoonga Nganjin Library, c3 Contemporary Art Space, Centre Pompidou (FRA), Bus Projects, The Narrows, Peloton, 1st Floor, Linden, Seventh, Strange Neighbour, and many more. I have a BA (Fine Arts – Sculpture) RMIT, was the founder of seventh gallery and am the founder and current director of c3 Contemporary Art Space in Melbourne." - Jon Butt