Field injury simulations

Shaun Gladwell's works draw together the seemingly disparate arenas of war, sport and art through a focus on simulation. Field injury simulations is drawn from footage filmed in Kuwait in 2009 when Gladwell was attached to the Australian Defence Force as an Australian War Memorial Official War Artist. The video mimics the conventions of documentary film to capture military personnel undertaking first responder training. The uncanny simulation of human life by high-tech mannequins blurs the line between humans and technology. In Reversed readymade (2016) and Reversed readymade (bicycle wheel) (2016) Gladwell combines virtual reality technology with references to Marcel Duchamp, an artist pivotal to the development of the notion of 'the readymade' as sculpture in the early Twentieth Century. In iconic works such as Bicycle wheel (1913), Duchamp removed functional objects from their original context and displayed them as artworks, thus questioning notions of value and craftsmanship. Gladwell's video makes the readymade functional again, by placing a BMX rider on a replica Duchampian wheel and inviting audience members to don virtual reality goggles and share the ride. Through his conflation of actual experience and constructed situations, Gladwell tests the boundaries between the real and simulated body, questioning the value and legitimacy of 'real experience' and aligning it with a consideration of the original and the replica in art.