Waiting Room

Stafford 02

Waiting Room is a video installation about the isolation and loneliness associated with language barriers, set in the strange "in-between" spaces that travelers inhabit. The viewer is invited into a constructed space, not unlike that of an airport or train station. The space is not designed for comfort, but for severe functionality. The videos themselves feature the artist in medium close up. She is apparently engaged in a conversation with an imaginary other; at times awkwardly bumbling through the guide-book phrases of various foreign languages and at others silent and clearly uncomfortable.

In this transient space the artist engages with the viewer in an unclear dialogue. The sentences are broken and the conversation is perforated with erratic gesturing - such is the lot of a foreigner. We live in a country where it is expected that migrants speak "our" language and understand our, often slippery, notion of cultural values, however the Australian overseas is often seen as a boorish cultural moron whose inability or lack of motivation to learn the local tongue is notorious. The traveler inhabits non-spaces; fluro-lit, air-conditioned nightmares officiated by guards. Everything is overpriced and the seats are always uncomfortable. Long stays are not encouraged.

Pip Stafford is a video artist working between Hobart and Melbourne. She has a BFA from the University of Tasmania, School of Art and was recently award the Kickstart Grant for the Next Wave Festival. In 2008 she will be an Artist in Residence at CESTA in the Czech Republic.

address
Inflight Elizabeth Street
237 Elizabeth St, Hobart TAS 7000
artists
Pip Stafford – Artist