YES. UNTITLED NO. 1

Rights Information
Year
2005
Reference
F85559
Media type
Moving image
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Rights Information
Year
2005
Reference
F85559
Media type
Moving image
Place of production
New Zealand/Aotearoa
Categories
Short
Duration
0:03:56
Credits
Director: Amanda Newell

“‘YES’ UNTITLED NO.1 is somewhere between a recorded performance work and a game. The work consists of a person dressed in a costume. The costume is then further extended by a very bad face paint rendering him pathetic. When you look at the person he appears to be trying to emulate a tiger. The image is drawing out the reading of the person who plays the tiger; like a painting in digital/real space.

The concept of time and how we experience time is brought to the viewer's attention. Via the tiger continually spinning in the frame. Two speeds of rotation when watching the work appear to last for a different duration. In real time the slow and the fast sequence last both last for exactly one minute.

Concepts of purgatory and mental isolation come through in the piece. While it references fashion via its production, shot in a studio then animated. Even though the tiger is a human, at times he appears as a toy. There is a strange entrapment and power dynamic that comes through, something like ridicule even seeming to have a relationship to the story "Little Black Sambo". In this story the tigers entrap Sambo as they run around him in a circle. The difference in ‘YES’ UNTITLED NO.1 is the tiger/human seems to have entrapped himself; spinning in a circle infinitely.

‘YES’ UNTITLED NO.1 was made with assistance from an Auckland City Creative Communities grant. The Tiger is played by Joseph Burgess Leary and the Technical Assistant was Mark McLean.” Exhibition notes.