Been there, done that

(2018)

Video and mixed media installation

UNSW Galleries, Sydney, October 2018.

Been there, done that presented a series of art works created during a two year postgraduate research project, supported by the University of New South Wales (Art and Design).

The research asked, how is the nomadic artist implicated in the promises and the paradoxes of global mobility? Through site-specific and travel-led processes, Beth Dillon’s practice inhabits tensions between heroic projections of mobility as a tool of individual transformation, freedom and resistance and the concrete administrative, legal, political, economic and cultural conditions that shape the movements of contemporary travellers. She uses materials gathered through the lived experience of international residency programs, long distance walks and cross-border romance to play with the contradictions and collusions of the nomadic artist in an age of globalisation. Works of video installation, photography and digital collage combine elements of humour, role-playing and performative intervention to stage both the pleasures and frustrations, the possibilities and limitations of nomadism as an artistic strategy and lifestyle.

Exhibition Essay by Kuba Dorabialski

Image credit: Document Photography and Silverlight Photography

But underneath the mechanics of humour and the sincere irony of her love for the tourist trap, Dillon’s work is about the seriousness of travel. The artist nomad, perhaps more than any other traveller in the 21st century, has the power and privilege of reflective detachment, as well as the unique burden of a critical audience, that forces their work to address the core impulses of human movement. With a set of sturdy boots, a couple of languages in her pocket, a joke up her sleeve and her heart on it, the traveller does important work.

Catalogue text, Kuba Dorabialski

BETH DILLON

Been there, done that

(2018)

Beth Dillon | Visual Artist | Performance Installation Video Text Sculpture | Costume and Set Design