Peter Callas is an acclaimed international artist of video, computer animation and digital prints. He has featured in numerous prestigious international exhibitions including Video and the Computer (1989) and Video: Two Decades (1992) both at MOMA, New York. From his pre-eminent status as a pioneer of video art to his most recent digital prints he has been at the forefront of technology creating technological terrains which map his cultural travels through New Guinea, Japan, the United States of America, Germany, Brazil, Tunisia, Egypt, India and Italy.
Cited as a paradigm of post colonial/post modern aesthetics, his work draws on various cultures, with an overload of images in an electronic storm which pulsate, saturate, inundate and layer, almost beyond assimilation. Saturated colour and patterns, computer animation of iconic logos and kitsch characters tell and retell in a syncretic hybrid (a synthesis of competing cultures) of narratives of manipulated reality, a cyber-collage of techno-media cultures most notably Japan and the USA.
From within the clamour and glamour of this culture Peter Callas draws on the role of memory, history and technology. Kinema No Yoru 1986 utilises pseudo commercials made for the world’s largest video screen at the Marui Department store in Tokyo in which menko playing card cartoon caricatures are colourised, duplicated, intercut, overlayed, distorted and rapidly overlayed. Night’s High Noon 1988 is a Bicentennial comment on the collision of Australian indigenous culture, European settlement and Asian immigration. Neo Geo 1990 critiques through Japanese eyes the American twin gods of democracy and capitalism; with memorable images such as Japanese Uncle Sam ‘wanting you’. Um Novo Tempo 2000 (a new time) draws upon Callas’s South America research into Afro-Brazilian religions such as the voodoo-like Candomblé, in a syncretistic hybrid, a mapping of conflict and the assimilation of old and new conventional and traditions .
Of his videos Peter Callas talks of a ‘zone of speed’- slow enough to allow for subliminal perception but fast enough to create a sense of loss, while his digital prints replace speed with density of detail. His static emblematic images are a concentrated challenge to the imagery devalued by saturation; they are for the artist ‘icons of loss’ which achieve resurrection by contemplation.
Peter Callas was born in Sydney in 1952, after graduating from Sydney University (1971-4) with BA Honours he worked with the ABC as a film editor (1975-78) before attending Sydney College of the Arts (1978-80) where he awarded a Diploma of Art. He has held numerous teaching positions in Australia and overseas since 1981 including Guest Professor, Computer Animation and Digital Imaging, Academy of Media Arts, Cologne, Germany 2000-01.
The exhibition title Squareize pays homage to the 1:1.25 width by height ratio of the pre-digital television screen. This proportion set in the 1930s simulated binocular peripheral vision. However the title alludes to ‘square eyes’ a popularist description for excessive television watching. For Peter Callas there is also the additional reference to the square pixel, the basic observable unit that forms the television image. Thus the title not only acknowledges the basic unit that forms video imagery, it also, in the case of his static digital prints in Squareize, focuses on particular images that build to form the content of his passing parade, a capturing of the moment for and from posterity.
Robert Lindsay, July 2004 |
