2014 Judge Dr Chris McAuliffe has awarded Melbourne-based collaborative duo Sonia Leber and David Chesworth, winners of the 2014 Gold Coast Art Prize for their video work We are printers too (2013), a high-definition video set in the former Age newspaper headquarters in Melbourne. Speculative and archaeological, the work accelerates and decelerates through this vacant, purpose-built building that once produced the daily news, from its pre-digital technologies and lost modes of communication.
‘For me, there was a clear winner; Sonia Leber and David Chesworth’s video We are printers too. Communications technology shapes our world but the artists’ video of an abandoned newspaper building shows how far and fast technology moves; yesterday’s high-tech is today’s junk. In trashed offices and workshops, the artists discover all manner of redundant communication technologies: rotary dial telephones, Morse code devices, linotype machines, ticker tapes. They show that the urgency of communication has shaped innovation, economics and social experience for almost two centuries. I was struck by the artists’ eye for detail; there isn’t a scene in which there isn’t a label, a sign or a metre … a reminder that, even before internet mobile phones, our entire environment was flooded with communications. In the end, the work isn’t just an elegy for the printing press; it’s a reminder that communication is our life blood,’ says McAuliffe.
The artwork has been acquired by Gold Coast City Gallery Collection.
Gold Coast City Art Gallery
Until 8 February, 2015
Queensland
Sonia Leber and David Chesworth, We are printers too 2013, HD video 16min
Courtesy of the artists and Fehily Contemporary, Melbourne
