Ritual and ecstasy: Jeremy Shaw’s ‘Phase Shifting Index’
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Trying to distil the visual language of euphoria into a single artwork is no simple task. If we conceive of euphoria (not the series) and nirvana (not the band) as profoundly sensuous, it follows that employing written language to communicate such phenomena might prove insufficient.
Driven by a kaleidoscope of coruscating imagery and a fractured temporal character, Berlin-based Canadian artist Jeremy Shaw’s Phase Shifting Index (2020), recently unveiled at the Museum of Old and New Art (MONA), explores how transcendental and revelatory states can allow for a kind of unrestricted agency to bloom, pithily sustain itself and then wilt, all within a few sultry moments. Commissioned and presented by a consortium of institutions including MONA, nipaluna/Hobart, Centre Pompidou, Paris, the Swiss Institute, New York, and the Frankfurter Kunstverein, Frankfurt, the work is now enjoying its Australian premiere.
Phase Shifting Index offers a rich spatial experience and explores Shaw’s ongoing fascination with altered cognisance and parallel realities, as well as the practices that trace such experiences. An immersive video installation in spirit, it can also be approached as a dance, experimental sound and quasi-archival artwork. Although the term ‘immersive’ has perhaps become overused in the wider context of contemporary art, it feels wholly appropriate when engaging with Shaw’s work.
Phase Shifting Index incorporates a seven-channel video installation and employs a raft of anachronistic media, such as 16mm film and Hi8 video tape, to present what appears, at first glance, to be found historical footage. Shaw presents a series of codified vignettes, in which fabricated subcultural groups engage in various forms of corporeal practice, including dance, physical therapy and other rites of movement. Phase Shifting Index excavates various points in pop-cultural history and provides ‘documentation’ snatched from recent memory, and includes frenetic grunge-era mosh pits, shimmering 1980s disco music videos and what could be a pensive Yvonne Rainer dance workshop.
These potent visual motifs oscillate steadily before morphing, or phasing, into something resembling synchronicity, at which point Phase Shifting Index starts to emanate a heady sense of euphoria and intoxication. As Shaw’s work proceeds towards climax, assorted bodies collude in opulent and harmonious throngs and the audience is met with a further encounter, a shared trip. Reaching its crescendo of dramatic action, Phase Shifting Index vibrates with a charged yet serene spiritual ferment. Typified by Shaw’s signature approach to datamosh visuals, the pulsating strobe-lit exhibition begins to respire deeply with choreographic contemporaneity. Following this moment of serenity, Phase Shifting Index begins to immediately burst, with torn pixels colliding across screens and disintegrating into a liquescent installation of psychedelia, before quickly fading into itself. There is a moment of pause, albeit devoid of resolution, before the cycle begins once again.
Yarran Gatsby, nipaluna/Hobart
Curated by Jarrod Rawlins, ‘Phase Shifting Index’ is currently on view at the Museum of Old and New Art alongside ‘Exodust – Crying Country’, a collaborative project by Fiona Hall and A. J. King (curated by Jane Clark and Jarrod Rawlins), and ‘Within an utterance’ by Robert Andrew (curated by Emma Pike). All exhibitions are on display until 17 October 2022.
