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Details
- Date
- 2018
- Media category
- Time-based art
- Materials used
- single channel digital video, colour, sound
- Edition
- 1 of 3 + AP
- Dimensions
- duration: 00:16:33 min, aspect ratio 16:9
- Signature & date
Signed c.l. Certificate of authenticity, black ink "J Conomos ". Not dated.
- Credit
- Contemporary Collection Benefactors 2018
- Location
- Not on display
- Accession number
- 245.2018
- Copyright
- © John Conomos
- Artist information
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John Conomos
Works in the collection
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About
'The girl from the sea' is a video portrait of the artist's late mother, which traces the story of her childhood, migration and suburban family life. The film's title refers to the subject's ancestral and mythic roots in Greece, and her passage to Australia by boat in the early 1940s. Intimate and elegiac, the camera tracks through the rooms of her home - vacated of personal belongings but full of memories - while the artist movingly narrates the details of their 'shared lifeworld together and in solitude'.
In devising 'The girl from the sea', Conomos drew inspiration from a number of historical works of film and literature that explore the emotional connection between mother and son: Roland Barthes' Camera Lucida (1981), Peter Handke's A sorrow beyond dreams (1972), and Germany in Autumn (1978) directed by Rainer Werner Fassbinder.