Katie Paine: Cities of Glass
SCREENWORKS

Katie Paine, Cities of Glass, 2024, moving image work, looped.

The video Cities of Glass uses a fictitious narrative to examine the historical development of mirrors and their scientific innovations. Cities continues a long-held consideration of slippery, retreating images. The work explores the perplexing nature of vision and how the ways that we see the world affect our experience of time and place.

This video focused on the history of Murano mirrors and briefly touches upon early modern notions of optics. Murano is imagined as a mythical city in which strange, colossal mirrors were constructed. These mirrors are portrayed as dangerous, capable of merging the real world with its reflection. The city and its artisans become embroiled in mysterious, possibly magical phenomena.

In Cities, a character is driven mad by the thin boundaries between the real and reflected world, using a historical scenario to comment on simulacra, hyperreality, and the power of image dissemination; ideas that resonate with contemporary fields of representation.

ABOUT THE ARTIST:

Katie Paine is a Naarm-based artist and writer. Her practice spans installation, video, narrative fiction, drawing, photography and occasionally performance. Her practice concerns itself with the serpentine trajectories of ideas and information across time, and the ways that we encounter and understand the world through the collection of information and the construction of knowledge. She is interested in the fallacies of institutionalised knowledge and the spectral and poetic spaces that open up during instances of miscommunication, failure and misunderstanding. Recent work has explored such ideas across the fields of semiotics, hauntology, archival politics, magical realism and science fiction.

Paine recently completed her MFA at the University of Melbourne in 2022. She has exhibited att First Draft, Spring 1883, Gertrude Contemporary, Kingston Art Centre, Metro Arts, Bundoora Homestead Footscray Community Arts Centre, Burnie Regional Gallery, Composite Moving Image, Lon Gallery, F.S. Meyer Gallery, CAVES, TCB, ACMI, c3 Contemporary Art Space, Kings ARI, La Trobe Art Institute, Blindside, George Paton Gallery, VOID Gallery, SEVENTH Gallery and Bus Projects. She has upcoming exhibitions at SEVENTH Gallery and Counihan Gallery and was recently shortlisted for the Darebin Art Prize. She writes for publications such as Performance Review, Vault Magazine, Art + Australia, un-Magazine, Running Dog, Runway Journal and Art Almanac alongside a variety of art galleries.

ABOUT SCREENWORKS

SCREENWORKS provides a dedicated screen space for video and moving-image work for Gasworks’ creative community. Each month a different work will be shown, celebrating the dynamism that screen-based media can offer.

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