Christopher Handran’s practice explores the apparatus as a condition of contemporary spectatorship. This is a transition from considering the apparatus as purely a means of producing images to an engagement with the potential of various apparatuses to generate experience. These include cameras, projectors, screens, lenses and viewing devices such as telescopes, kaleidoscopes and stereoscopes. This potential is explored through direct and immersive engagements between audience and apparatus, at a variety of scales.
In the studio, he experiments with, modifies and physically deconstructs these new and old technologies in a ‘DIY’ manner in order to foreground both their material presence and the perceptual dimensions of spectatorship. Studio and gallery spaces become laboratories of perceptual affect, bringing the audience face to face with the apparatus, or immersing the spectator within its workings in a performative viewing experience.
His works often play with the illusion of ‘being there’ offered by recent popular returns to 3D cinema and Virtual Reality, with their dizzying manipulations of depth and motion. The works play with the limitations of these technologies of spectacle; they invite the spectator to adapt to the viewing requirements of the apparatus, bending down, looking through, or manoeuvring their body in a performative act of viewing. These viewing devices bring the spectator face to face with the apparatus, foregrounding its operations as a direct part of their experience.
The Curves of Sensations Exhibition
15 February – 4 March 2017
Metro Arts Gallery
www.metroarts.com.au