Dennis Del Favero
2004
Three
Screen Video Installation
Interactive DVD-ROM
Deep Sleep moves backwards and forwards in time between a
notorious Sydney psychiatric institution of the 1970's, where patients
were subjected to "deep sleep" therapy, and the Chelmsford
Royal Commission, established in the 1990's to investigate the many
deaths that occurred there. Deep sleep therapy involved inducing
patients into a coma lasting between one to eight weeks. Many patients
either died during the sleep or awoke from it with varying degrees
of impairment, ranging from permanent amnesia to chronic panic. The
work acts as the backdrop for a double layered love story, firstly involving
Dr Bailey, the director of Chelmsford, and one of his patients, a
Dancer, and paralleled by an affair between a Royal Commission investigator
and Bailey's former Secretary. The story is composed of a series of
narrative recollections exploring the events leading up to the Dancer’s
death, Bailey's suicide, the findings of the Commission Investigator
and the involuntary memories of the Secretary.
While based on actual events and extensive research, the work uses
the events as a way of exploring the interplay between the world of
psychiatry and the world of psychosis. Its narrative operates as a
dream-like theatre of encounters between the four characters in a
landscape where the hallucinations of psychiatry overlap with the
logic of psychosis. Just as in the world of sleep, where conventional
logic is replaced by a dream logic which blurs all spatial and temporal
boundaries, so in this work characters and narratives blend into each
other, bringing the normal boundaries between image and sound into
question. This is achieved by the interchangeability of narrative
elements. For example, at some points in the script the same scenes
are played but with different voice-overs. Because of these interchangeable
relationships, the recollections of Bailey, the Dancer, the Investigator
and the Secretary become so intertwined that it becomes impossible to
delineate one from the other, either the frailty of the Patient, the
reason of the Psychiatrist, the calculated analysis of the Investigator
or the memories of the Secretary.
Exhibited at:
Ivan Dougherty Gallery, Sydney; Mori Gallery, Sydney; Galerie Andreas Binder, Munich; Sprengel Museum Hannover; Kunstmuseum Bonn, Bonn; Implant Art, Bonn, 2004; Preview Berlin, Berlin; Experimental Art Foundation, Adelaide. 2005; Lawrence Wilson Gallery, Perth; 2006.
Credits:
Director, Producer and Designer: Dennis Del Favero
Writer: Stephen Sewell
Composer: Kate Moore
Sound design: Tony MacGregor, Dennis Del Favero
DVD-ROM Designer and Programmer: Volker Kuchelmeister
Sound Engineer: John Jacobs
Stylist and Designer: Karla Urizar
Make-up: Coco Miles
Steady Cam Operator: David MacKenzie
Voice-overs: Kelly Butler, Ray Ryan, Danny Adcoc, Mary Regan
Produced by the iCinema Centre for Interactive Cinema Research, UNSW
Co-produced in association with Radio Eye, ABC Radio National
Funded by:
Australia
Council for the Arts
College of Fine Arts, University of New South Wales.
|
|
|
