Video
Brodie Ellis, Ghost Waterfall , 2024 Rehmann Museum, Switzerland, 9:51 mins. installation documentation by Studio Stucky
Technology of the future. Vanessa Billy, Brodie Ellis, Paul Schatz
November 9, 2024 to June 29, 2025
Opening: November 8, 2024, 7 p.m.
Laufenburg saw two milestones in the power supply beyond the state's borders: the hydroelectric power plant (1914) and the Laufenburg Star (1958). Now, starting in 2025, the Laufenburg Technology Center, a data center with an enormous storage battery, is scheduled to be built. Electricity plays a central role in our daily lives, but at the same time, its production poses risks and creates unsolved problems. The exhibition at the Rehmann Museum poses the question from an artistic perspective: What should the technology of the future look like? How do electricity and ecology reconcile?
Vanessa Billy (*1978 in Geneva, resident in Zurich) and Brodie Ellis (*1979 in Lismore, resident in Dja Dja Wurrung Country, Castlemaine, Australia) explore the question of the region's electrical infrastructure. Using this archaeological approach and a focus on a belief in progress and sustainability, they seek a new perspective on the future. To this end, they are creating site-specific works at the Rehmann Museum that do not aim to provide definitive answers to these questions, but offer an artistic perspective on the urgent prerequisites for new technologies.
Scientific and aesthetic inspiration can be found in the work of mathematician and artist Paul Schatz (1898–1979, born in Konstanz, died in Arlesheim), who dedicated his life to a "nature-friendly mechanical engineering" and environmentally friendly future technologies.
In the summer of 2024, Brodie Ellis spent five weeks in Laufenburg. She used the time to create two sculptural installations and a video work that explore energy generation, storage, and management. Her work explores the integration of cultural knowledge, the sustainable use of natural resources, and the consideration of complex ecosystems when deploying new and conventional technologies. By interpreting a control room and a battery storage system in her own way, incorporating elements from nature and parts of the cultural and intergenerational knowledge from Laufenburg's society, the artist develops a new perspective on these hidden resources—beyond the pursuit of progress at the expense of the environment.
text from Rehmann Museum website: https://www.rehmann-museum.ch/museum/programm/technologie-der-zukunft
Brodie Ellis, Ghost Waterfall 2024, 9:51mins 2024 pic by Studio Stucky
Brodie Ellis, Gravity Wave 2023, Bendigo Art Gallery, video still from Essays on Earth, 3 channel synced HD video with sound.
Essays on Earth
Essays on Earth is a collaboration between multidisciplinary artist Brodie Ellis, painter and printmaker John Wolseley and poet Paul Kane, uniting the work of three leading artists of the Bendigo region. Across three gallery spaces, Ellis and Wolseley’s focused observations of the natural world, expressed through photography, sculpture, painting and moving image, are arranged in dialogue with the elemental themes and poetic reflections of Kane’s recent series of ‘verse essays’, titled Earth, Air, Water, Fire (2022).
Ellis’ sculptural field studies and digitally hand-coloured experiments in botanical and mineral microscopy focus on local ecologies, magnifying the strange beauty of natural forms, including seed pods, and cross-sections of rocks and plants. In contrasting scale, Wolseley’s paintings and woodcut prints, populated with plants and animals, carbon traces and geological rubbings, capture the pulse of vibrant and sprawling ecosystems in diverse landscapes across Australia. Employing a combination of scientific processes and artistic exploration, each artist immerses themselves in the landscape, engaging directly with the features and materials that embody the energies and stories of their chosen sites.
At the heart of the exhibition is an expansive video installation inviting deep listening and reflection. Fusing poetry and image, Ellis’ experimental microscopy and macro photography of Wolseley’s paintings unfold across the gallery in a meditative flow, united by the resonant tones of Paul Kane reciting his elemental poem. Grounded in a deep ecological awareness, Essays on Earth conjures complex systems of nature and their interconnectedness with human experience, inspiring wonder and appreciation for the delicate beauty and mysteries of the natural world from the minuscule to the vast.
Directed & Edited by Brodie Ellis
Composition and sound design by Peter Knight
Field recordings by Brodie Ellis & Cameron Robbins
Score performed by:
Peter Knight - trumpet, organ, electronics
Rachael Kim - violin
Katherine Philp - cello
Jacques Emery - bass
Recorded by Peter Knight and Jem Savage
Mixed by Peter Knight
Brodie Ellis, video still from Essays on Earth, 2023, Bendigo Art Gallery, 3 channel synced HD video with sound duration 2.5hrs. Pic by Leon Schoots
Brodie Ellis, Contact and Witness video still
2019 single channel SD video with stereo sound duration 00:11:11 edition of 3
Contact & Witness
Single channel HD video and stereo sound.
John Wolseley reflecting on his experience viewing 'Contact & Witness'.
“Sometime in 2019, I was walking down Acland Street and wandered into Linden Gallery. I went into a darkened room and found my field of vision taken over by a huge screen filled with a quivering pulsating field of ‘what on earth is that’? Was it the surface of a lily pond, or the magnified skins of a toad or even the bubbling lava flowing out of a volcano? After a time, I could differentiate between one or two rippling forms and equally quivery surrounding fields of what turned out to be feathery seaweed stuff. And then my eye met with another eye. Several of these pulsating forms kind of faded in and out of focus and I realised that they were cuttlefish. Sometime later I met the actual artist and she explained to me that the luminous patterned mosaics on the body of these cuttlefish pass through successive colour changes activated by several mysterious physiological urges. Sometime for camouflage they merge with sand and rock. These cuttlefish were engaging in a big love festival; and it was as if the sexual and courtship urges deep within them became visible on their skins. I watched the video run though several times and puzzled about how it was that there seemed a marvellous kind of synergy or elective affinity between the eye of the viewer, the surface of the screen and the energy field of the cuttlefish.
Was this something to do with the magic of the video medium and the great big screens? Or the way one’s whole field of vision is filled with a single moving plane of movement? It’s as if the viewer is looking through the curved lens of a giant eye or even turning into one – like the eye in Odilon Redon’s famous lithograph, The Eye Balloon. As I walked along St Kilda pier and peered into the murky water of the bay, I wondered why looking at Brodies’ video had been so gorgeously revelatory; and how it had made me feel that I had left my human self behind and merged into ‘cuttlefishness. ‘
And then I had a vivid memory of another time when I had looked into the eye of a wild creature and had just such a total visceral connection with it. It was when I was climbing high on a mountain ridge on the Cuillin ranges in Skye. In a high wind I was moving past a rock face near the top of the mountain. I looked to my left as the wall of rock ended and right close-up to me resting on the wind was a huge golden eagle. I was so close that the side of the bird with its rippling feathers completely filled my vision... It slowly turned its head toward me, our eyes met – and then silently slowly it sank into the valley below.”
-JW 2021
Excerpt from the Linden New Art exhibition catalogue-
“Contact and Witness, documents the mating displays of cuttlefish. Ellis captured this footage over a number of days filming at Point Lowly in South Australia. The film shows how the cuttlefish are able to signal and communicate by fluorescing and generating intricate variations in the colour and pattern of their skin. They are also able to camouflage themselves perfectly into their surroundings. The cuttlefish’s means of protecting themselves is completely self-sufficient. Their intelligence manifests in their ability to reflect their environment.”
Juliette Hanson 2019
Curator, Linden New Art.
Soundtrack by the artist and mastered by Steve Grant
Brodie Ellis The Crystal World 2016, single channel video with sound
The Crystal World
The Crystal World incorporates open source found footage of Australian mining detonations. This material is edited together to form an ongoing series of explosions, as barren desert landscapes suddenly erupt in plumes of earth. The work evokes elements of Land Art and Abstract Expressionism, while the soundtrack, composed of mechanical clinks and technological groans, was recorded by Ellis with Cameron Robbins and Jake Clover contributing sonic performances.
The title refers to a 1966 science fiction novel by English author J. G. Ballard, in which a physician tries to find a secluded treatment facility deep in a jungle where an apocalyptic phenomenon crystallises everything it touches. In the context of Ellis’ work this becomes a metaphor for the environmental consequences of the anthropocene.
Exhibited in the group exhibition 'Material Place' at UNSW Gallery.
‘Material Place - Reconsidering Australian Landscapes’ gathers artists who are thinking through the materiality of the Australian landscape and its representation — whether in local ochres or on Google Earth. The intricate connection between places and peoples is a focus of reflection for many of the artists, some of whom chart First Nations' intergenerational relationships to Country. The exhibition also explores how intertwined political and economic forces can reshape a place for generations to come, with particular concern for environmental degradation and how the impact of mining and fracking reverberates beyond a single site.
From soaring aerial views to microscopic illustrations, degraded maps and speculative models, the exhibition considers how representations of the land can transform our relationship with the environment. 'Material Place' expresses that in order to represent the Australian landscape, we must firstly grapple with our place within it.
Artists
Robert Andrew
Tully Arnot
Megan Cope
Brodie Ellis
Bonita Ely
Lu Forsberg
Gunybi Ganambarr
Dale Harding
Mabel Juli
Nicholas Mangan
Yukultji Napangati
and Rachel O’Reilly
Curator
Ellie Buttrose (Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art)
Umbra Penumbra Antumbra
Umbra Penumbra Antumbra
2 channel video with 11.2 surround sound, multi media sculpture, approx. 20m x10m x 5m.
Exhibited as part of a larger installation in the 17th Biennale of Sydney 2010 ‘Songs of Survival in a Precarious Age’ curated by David Elliot, Founding Director, Mori Art Museum, Tokyo, Japan, 2001-2006
Soundtrack in collaboration with the artist, Joss Rigby, Emily Rigby & James Rigby at Silver Sound Studio Brisbane.
Noosphere
Noosphere is the video component of an installation exhibited at ACCA in 2009 by Brodie Ellis. It shows the formation of the Morning Glory Cloud which is a rare meteorological phenomenon. The harbinger of the wet season in north eastern Australia, it is also the only single mass roll cloud formation occurring seasonally anywhere in the world. The footage was shot in the Gulf of Carpentaria over Burketown, Queensland.
Soundtrack in collaboration with the artist and Joss Rigby at Silver Sound Studios, Brisbane.
NEW09 was curated by Charlotte Day. Exhibiting Artists: Justine Khamara, Brodie Ellis, Marco Fusinato, Simon Yates, Matthew Griffin, Benjamin Armstrong, Pat Foster and Jen Berean
"The noosphere (/ˈnoʊ.əsfɪər/; sometimes noosphere) is the sphere of human thought.[1][2] The word derives from the Greek νοῦς (nous "mind") and σφαῖρα (sphaira "sphere"), in lexical analogy to "atmosphere" and "biosphere".[3]" wikipedia.
Brodie Ellis The Superpit 2008 video still. Single channel stereo sound.
The Superpit
Single channel video with stereo sound.
Soundtrack composed by Misha Dumnov.
Exhibited as a component of a larger installation of the same name, at Conical as part of Next Wave Festival 2008. Curated by Jeff Kahn.
Here is an excerpt from a review by Alex Martinis Roe-
“Set back from the sculptures on a recessed wall, a large-scale projection showed the movement of trucks and other machinery in the Kalgoorlie mine. The film used camera angles, pans and editing to author a trembling sense of the earth's depth. The style of the video editing immediately described the recessed wall as a kind of open cinema: a drive-in. I watched as tiny people fixed a broken machine and a rush of empathy washed over me; I felt I was watching them torture some injured beast into working—not the expected feeling towards a machine designed to destroy. Ellis' film, with a powerful cinematic score by Misha Dumnov, anthropomorphises the machinery until we mourn their broken bodies. As I watched these machines, dwarfed by the size of the mine, I realised that they could be seen as contemporary incarnations of the human miners of previous generations.
The second part of the film is shot from the inside of a car driving along an outback highway at night towards a fork lightning storm. The story: a never-ending drive on a highway towards the earth's wrath. Apocalyptic films are thrilling. This thrill-seeking drive towards a phallic storm seems to be reflective of a certain type of cinema experience. A thrill can be a variety of abject responses to breaking taboos or the confusion of boundaries. These disruptions to order incite disgust and fear, which break down identification with offending characters and events. Creating psychological distance between the viewer and the undesirable ultimately reaffirms the viewer's identity: they are not in danger or breaking taboos, but they have to scream in order to feel safe about who they are. The Australian landscape has been described anecdotally as the ultimate feminine abject space. To be crude, this describes it as the biggest and scariest vagina i.e. a space without language or spatial markers (you can't get much Closer Together in the outback than that!). This is completely sexist, yet this metaphor persists in cultural language as the thrill of the sublime. The Super Pit's soundtrack features a spare and lamenting guitar in a looped country music rhythm, which marks the film as a Western. Westerns challenge us to accept abject scenarios because they are stories of distant lawlessness, reinforcing the comfort of our own comparative safety. There is a kind of pleasure in imagining the desolate life 'out west' and an appreciation of the genre as pure entertainment. In giving the film a Western flavour, Ellis critically interrogates 'exploring the outback' by being really camp: the desert, the darkness and the mine are all giant holes. Ellis' film entertains, but the horror that she describes is a reality. The thrill and wonder of the mine and the road become an uncomfortable pleasure, mingled with sorrow.”
^published in Runway magazine, issue #11 pg 75, 2008.
Brodie Ellis The Superpit 2008 installation view Conical Gallery, photographer: Christian Capurro.