Chop Suey

Steve Rosendale

"The Material Gaze"

Exhibition held at Libby Edwards Galleries Melbourne

8th SEPTEMBER 2012

"Films and ephemera from the early sixties have such a profound effect on me. Watching the television re-runs as a child I sensed the yawing chasm of time between myself and when these films were made. I longed for and reminisced about a past I never had. Yet I felt a great connection to that time and saw great beauty in the way the world was. The beauty that I found though is fleeting, unobtainable, intangible. A word or gesture, a look, a scene, glimpsed from a moving car... To create a work of art form that scene is to extend that glimpse of beauty for a few moments more.

Films of the past allow us to discover time, the knowledge that the actor we see on the screen who "struts and frets his hour upon the stage" must now be quite old and no longer appear that way. I believe that we can sense the age and gravity of a thing without having any prior experience or knowledge of it. Such as when we are are confronted with sepiatone photographs or images of the past we immediately begin to reminisce. We experience feelings of nostalgia for times and places we have never been or for people we have never met." Steve Rosendale