Constance ARI

Nocturne is an installation of variable dimensions. Professionally produced illuminated signs, similar to those used to advertise fantastical meals in noodle bars, are mounted in front of a continuous open light-box. This creates a seemingly 360 degree cityscape as seen by night. The image has been composed from around 500 images of cities by night, down-loaded from the Internet. These represent a mixture of tourist snaps, the efforts of amateur photographers and municipally commissioned publicity shots. The images have been unified by enhancing the colour to preternatural levels - again suggesting the garish quality of cityscape signage - and then setting all against the flat black background of night. The resulting image is reminiscent of the backdrop to news readers and political commentators; or the classic aerial shots used as the scene-setting device at the beginning of a film.

The evolution of language through common usage is perhaps the best guide we have to the development of contemporary culture. My intention with Nocturne was to use the bewilderment and fascination of the émigré coming to turns with a new signifying system as a mechanism for considering that system: an attempt to document for example the nauseous experience at the end of a long flight of the familiar and the exotic being thrown together in the crude cocktail of jetlag - the result of 20 hours spent looking out of the window of a plane; the night expanding in slow-motion; familiar and then alien cities appearing below, made equal, de-politicised from the accelerated viewpoint. To observe the perceptual experience of place stretched to breaking point, as time zones melt away and attention waxes and wanes; sometimes spending longer looking at a fabled city, sometimes seeing nothing but abstract constellations of dispersed lights in brief hallucinogenic moments between sleep.

Kit Wise Melbourne, May 2003