ON ART PODCAST – The Waiting Room
Rolf de Heer and Molly Reynolds are two of the most highly-regarded contributors to Australian screen culture. Known for the works they have created individually and in collaboration — Ten Canoes (2006), Another Country (2015) and The Tracker (2002) — they have historically foregrounded Indigenous culture and the experience of the Australian landscape.
Molly Reynolds & Rolf de Heer: The Waiting Room, installation view, Anne & Gordon Samstag Museum of Art, University of South Australia. Photograph by Sam Noonan.
De Heer and Reynolds spoke to Nicole Haack having just completed their latest project – an immersive, hypnotic, cinematic artwork at the Samstag Museum of Art that considers human intervention in the natural world.
Stepping inside the Samstag Museum’s custom-built cube, you are completely surrounded by Rolf and Molly’s vision and immersed in some of Australia’s most pristine and untouched environments. Here, you encounter Osca, a creature born of this Earth with the ability to adapt, blend and become a part of her environments. Artefacts of human invention, design and discovery raise a question of time: is Osca’s planet pre-or post-human – a time before we have invaded or after we have left? In this ambiguity, The Waiting Room points to the complexity of human beings, to our resourcefulness and ingenuity but also our rapaciousness and destructiveness.
Their first work made expressly for the gallery context, The Waiting Room redefines the boundaries of Virtual Reality by dispensing with the conventional, solitary experience of VR headsets.
Listen in to this second instalment in the Samstag Museum of Art podcast series, as the internationally award-winning Australian filmmakers discuss their ambitious new gallery commission, on now at the University of South Australia’s Samstag Museum of Art until the 30 November for the 2018 Adelaide Film Festival.
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With thanks to The Message Pod