“Colours are not possessions; they are the intimate revelations of an energy field… They are light waves with mathematically precise lengths, and they are deep, resonant mysteries with boundless subjectivity.” - Ellen Meloy 

The world is not coloured. Colour is an experience, a sensory collision of interior and exterior worlds. These six films communicate beyond language, they dwell in the domain of affect. They gesture towards otherworldly landscapes and space-time configurations, celestial forms, sacred geometry and psychedelic optics. They conjure hypnotic realms through their amorphous use of colour, abstraction, and non-objective forms. Meditating on the cyclical rhythms of nature, exciting primordial sensations and synaesthesia. They flower and illuminate dormant places and spaces. To watch is to be radiant. 

Curated by Adele Wilkes and Anita Spooner 

Adele Wilkes, Electric Dream Machine, HD video, 2015. 4mins 
Linda Loh, Orbs + Deep Pink, HD video, 2018-2023. 10:17mins 
Linda Loh, Beyond Agog, HD video, 2021. 07:56mins 
Linda Loh, Adventures in Nurbland Composite - with Epilogue, HD video, 2022. 10:16mins 
Emma x Zhang, Enter the Underworld, HD video, 2023. 6:38mins 
Brodie Ellis, Contact & Witness, SD video, 2019. 11:11mins  

Adele Wilkes, Electric Dream Machine, HD video, 2015. 4mins 
Electric Dream Machine is a digital update to Brion Gysin and Ian Sommerville’s 1961 Dreamachine – a perforated cylinder that produces a strobe effect as it revolves on a turntable. The original work was inspired by new discoveries in neuroscience, and the idea that viewing these patterns of light generates neural oscillations that can heighten consciousness and creativity. Electric Dream Machine is designed to induce a meditative or hallucinatory state through the use of sound and light frequencies that stimulate alpha waves in the brain. The viewer experiences the same audiovisual frequencies as the woman in the video, potentially even syncing to her brain waves, in a mirrored feedback loop collapsing space and time, machine and human. Electric Dream Machine can be experienced with eyes open or closed. 

Linda Loh, Orbs + Deep Pink, HD video, 2018-2023. 10:17mins 
The orbs are restless, quivering representations of luminous circular forms, existing and not existing, hovering in their own version of space. They morph across colour fields, eventually transmuting into Deep Pink, a final circle of quietude.  An arbitrary boundary, like a drawing, that could be a portal, somewhere... 

Linda Loh, Beyond Agog, HD video, 2021. 07:56mins 
The video Beyond Agog emanates from the artist’s virtual reality work, Agog, 2021 — a luminous, colour-saturated, non-ordinary ‘world’, revealing fleeting spaces beyond everyday experience. Filmed ‘on location’ inside Agog, transient encounters and shifting views present elusive and ephemeral realms, with unknown forms and scale; a journey through a sublime space.  

Linda Loh, Adventures in Nurbland Composite - with Epilogue, HD video, 2022. 10:16mins 
The abstract video Adventures in Nurbland Composite - with Epilogue is an experiment in distortion and translation of original light based source material. Passing through multiple stages of evolution, the photographic and digital imagery is subject to manipulation using digital tools such as After Effects, Photoshop and the programming languages Max MSP and TouchDesigner. Algorithmic and tone reactive procedures are used, and early on data visualisation that mapped data from a stars database with neurophysiological data has contributed to the abstraction. The result is a non-narrative journey, with its own internal logic, ephemeral and elusive.  Experimental sound made by the artist helps to transport the viewer to another space beyond mind and body, mesmerising and hypnotic. 

Emma x Zhang, Enter the Underworld, HD video, 2023. 6:38mins 
This video project interrogates how natural phenomena can be manipulated through a series of fragmented images. Through organising and duplicating online archives of microcosms and organisms, including insects, deep-sea creatures viewed through microscopic and high-resolution lenses, this video harnesses the hyper-colour and abstraction of the natural world. The sound composition by Dylan Marelic (a multimedia artist based in Naarm/Melbourne) that accompanies the video is a collage of natural and synthetic elements. The natural elements are built from field recordings of insects, birds, and wind through trees, creating a sonic correlation with the organic elements in the visuals. The synthetic elements mirror the organic nature of the field recordings blurring the lines between organic and artificial. 

Brodie Ellis, Contact & Witness, SD video, 2019. 11:11mins  
Contact & Witness is a poetic rumination on the colourful mating displays of the Sepia apama (Giant Australian 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 

Biographies 

Adele Wilkes is an artist whose practice encompasses moving image, sound, photography, projection and installation, with a focus on expanded, experimental, poetic and essayistic modes of documentary and cinematic storytelling. She is particularly excited by the transformative potential of collaborative, multisensory and experiential processes. Her work has been exhibited, screened, published, broadcast, and transmitted into deep space, by organisations including ACMI, Buxton Contemporary, and Channels Festival. She is currently a PhD candidate in the School of Art, RMIT, Naarm/Melbourne. 

Linda Loh is an Australian visual artist whose multimedia works navigate digital space with transformed sources of light. She holds a Bachelor of Fine Art (Expanded Studio Practice) from RMIT in Naarm/Melbourne. Then, before and after graduating from School of Visual Arts in New York City in 2021, with an MFA in Computer Arts, she has participated in various international artist residencies and exhibition projects, in both physical space and online. Most recently she was engaged in an innovative curatorial project, culminating in an exhibition at Untitled Miami in December 2022. Read more on Linda Loh's website.

Emma x Zhang (EXZ) is a multidisciplinary artist located in Naarm(Melbourne). EXZ utilises paintings, mixed media, video, digital prints and light projection installation as expression, since she received her Master of Fine Arts at RMIT University and a bachelor of Design (Communication Design). She has ongoing commissioned paintings and large-scale mural works since 2015. In 2022, a site-specific collaborative project with Rhys Cousins, “The Möbius Universe“ was the competition winner for a suspended artwork located in RMIT Swanston library, at the same year, her video works were featured in the Testing Grounds Public Art during the Melbourne Fringe Festival, and Miscellania Bar, while printed artworks were shown in Platform Arts and Queen Victoria Women’s Centre. EXZ’s imaginative practice is reflected through her interests in design, technology, digital visual culture, and exploring new ways of seeing. 

Brodie Ellis an Australian multidisciplinary artist living and working on Dja Dja Wurrung Country. Her work often attends to contemporary ecological issues between science and ethics. Her interest in social and environmental issues is applied to site-specific explorations, resulting in works that question our use of natural resources and the pursuit of technological puissance in poetic and suggestive ways. Her art is held in public and private art collections including MONA, Museum of Old and New Art in Hobart.  

Anita Spooner is a producer, curator, writer and editor based in Naarm/Melbourne.

Curated by Adele Wilkes and Anita Spooner on the unceded lands of the Wurundjeri people of the Kulin Nations. We pay our respects to their Elders, past and present, and to all Indigenous peoples, and their sovereign lands and waters.