Amos Gebhardt

Amos Gebhardt brings an experienced knowledge of cinematography to the field of video installation…. In the new work for the Adelaide Biennial, Divided Worlds, Gebhardt immerses the viewer in a square room with four large projections. Each screen holds a familiar Australian landscape: a salt lake, a rock formation, a sandy desert and a waterfall in a forest. The images meet one another along matching horizon lines. This allows for a continuum in both time and place, which is emphasised by the choreographed sequences of ten dancers in each environment. Forty individuals from diverse backgrounds have been chosen to expand normative ideas of the body. The ritual dance movements that unfold on screen amongst the ensemble have been scripted by Gebhardt to represent the becoming and decline of the human in and of the natural world.

ANNE MARSH

At the Samstag Museum of Art, Gebhardt presents a filmic dance of an entirely different kind. In this multi-channel video, Lovers, 2018 – Gebhardt celebrates the drama of powerful thoroughbred horses, performing a courting ritual of extraordinary intimacy. Gebhardt’s poetic meditation on the animal language of consent and desire connects the viewer to a force and emotion, in which we become complicit partners to an act of passion. ​

ERICA GREEN

The artist gratefully acknowledges that Evanescence has been assisted by the Australian Government through the Australia Council, its arts funding and advisory body with generous support from The Felix Foundation and Chunky Move and Lovers was made with the generous support of the Sidney Myer Fund, The Butchery and Manimal Post