Heroes, 2002, single channel digital video, duration: 05:00
About the work
Heroes is a series of video portraits of five young women set to a slowed down interpretation of David Bowie’s song Heroes.
Reminiscent of a kind of commercial photographic portraiture that brings to mind the debutant or the talent quest contestant, the five women present have similarities in their appearance that connects them to a certain type.
Each with long brown hair and dressed identically in a red t-shirt, the headshots of the individuals are presented as double exposures. The effect depicts the woman, with her complimentary double, in the same frame. The pair are frozen, staring at a point beyond the viewer, backlit with a beatific purple glow.
In this video the artist recorded the subject posing for five minutes without moving. The last minute of the pose was used in the edit, at which point the subject had relaxed from their initial nervousness and eased into what appears as a kind of reverie.
About the artist
Born Sydney 1976
Lives & works Sydney
Angelica Mesiti is a video, performance and installation artist based in Sydney. Her works take everyday environments and attempts to discover their unseen potential through displaced activities like performance, dance, costume and music. She was a founding member of the Sydney artists run Gallery Imperial Slacks during which time she curated the two part video publication Serial 7’s. She has held solo shows at Mori Gallery (2003) and Rubyare Gallery (2004) and her work has been shown in Australia and overseas including; O.K Video Festival (2005), National Gallery of Indonesia, Jakarta, Game On (2006) for the Next Wave festival, Gertrude St Contemporary Art Space, Melbourne and the touring show PLAY: Portraiture and Performance in Recent Video Art from Australia and New Zealand, (2006) shown at The Performance Space Sydney, Adam Art Gallery New Zealand and Perth Institute of Contemporary Art. She has been employed by the College of Fine Arts as a casual lecturer in the Time Based Art department since 2001.
Mesiti is also a member of the collaborative group The Kingpins, who have exhibited and performed in museums nationally and overseas including the Liverpool Biennial 2006 – UK, The Palais de Tokyo and Nuit Blanche-Paris 2006, Contemporary Art Centre – Vilnius, Lithuania and Zacheta National Gallery of Art – Warsaw 2006, Transmodern Age Festival, Maryland, Baltimore USA 2006, South Korea, 2004 Taipei Biennale, Taipei Fine Arts Museum, Super Delux Tokyo 2004.
Exhibition catalogue