Australian Video Art Archive

John A Douglas

 

Screen Test # 5 Australiana

00:01:44 2005

Douglas restages the suicide scene  from Ted Kotchef’s Wake in Fright in a derelict petrol station on the outskirts of Sydney reminiscent of an Ed Ruscha gas station in the American west. The work embodies a ravaged masculinity and self-destructive psychosis in the Australian landscape that is as relevant now as it was then.  Douglas revives the aesthetic of cheap Australian TV Dramas of the sixties and seventies in an attempt to foreground the forgotten narratives that lay the foundations of our identity.

DVD available