Running Men Reference Image

For the 19th Biennale of Sydney (2014), Brisbane-based artist Daniel McKewen presented his ongoing, multi-screen video work Running Men (2008–14) at Carriageworks. Across five screens, Tom Cruise, Cary Grant and a cast of other iconic male actors, including Harrison Ford as Indiana Jones, appear in an endless loop, running towards the camera, towards the viewer, ever pursued but never caught.

McKewen has isolated each runner, positioning them against the formless void of a black background. We are not privy to whom or what they are running from; the blank space surrounding the men is primed instead for the projection of our own imagined scenarios. Out of context, the actors become surrogates for the artist and the audience, running from our own infinite anxieties and fears. McKewen has likened this idea of an endless chase to Friedrich Nietzsche’s theory of ‘eternal recurrence’; a philosophical concept which posits that the entire universe, our personal experiences and physical bodies, are destined to reoccur, as they are, and as they have previously been, ad infinitum.

Pop culture and film have always been of interest to McKewen. Working primarily with film, his practice explores Hollywood and the entertainment industry while examining the creative, critical and emotional response of fans and consumers alike. How fans creatively digest, react and engage with the material we consume are points of interest for the artist – with video and screens an apt way to artistically reflect on these ideas.

McKewen’s interest in pop culture, and in the ways in which we create and share contemporary stories, stems from his own position as both artist and fan. He is aware of the disparity between these labels: one implying creation and criticality; the other, consumption and an emotional response. Borrowing pop culture’s own devices, including the codes, conventions and imagery of cinema, McKewen appropriates and analyses existing footage to explore how being a fan can be an active, rather than a merely passive, experience.

The passage of indeterminacy in the intensification of being (2011) is a reinterpreted film clip of songstress Katy Perry. Her sexually charged videos are slowed down and distorted, making Perry appear both seductive and grotesque. Saturated with light and sound, the work is mesmerising. When viewing the dramatically intensified close-ups of Perry’s face in a constant state of flux, we are offered a space to contemplate the idea of our own role in the consumption of mass media. This work, like many of McKewen’s films, becomes a fluid, abstract, moving canvas.

In Every face on Vanity Fair’s Hollywood covers 1995–2008 (2009), McKewen has created new and distorted versions of celebrity portraiture. As the title suggests, McKewen has expertly merged the front cover celebrities from Vanity Fair magazines produced over that time period. By reframing, re-editing and morphing the original material, various moments of strange mutation have been created; faces have been frozen halfway between one and another, continually moving and shifting from one to the next. Forced smiles become twisted scowls, and serenely poised stares are reframed into abstracted shapes. A painterly landscape is created as the scenes shift and change, fading in and out, never quite satisfying our expectation as they merge from one seamless cut into the next.

McKewen graduated with a Doctorate of Philosophy from Queensland University of Technology (QUT), Brisbane, in 2013. In 2006, he completed a Bachelor of Fine Arts with Honours from the same institution. McKewen has been the subject of solo exhibitions, including ‘Faces of Vanity Fair’, QUT Public Art Billboard, Brisbane (2012); ‘Distance’, Institute of Modern Art, Brisbane (2012); and ‘The Art of Being a Fan’, The Block, QUT, Brisbane (2012). He has participated in national and international group shows, including ‘Bazinga!’, Starkwhite, Auckland (2013); ‘Peripheral Visions: Contemporary Art from Australia’, Garis & Hahn, New York (2012); SafARI, Sydney (2012); Next Wave Festival, Melbourne (2008); and ‘The Vernacular Terrain’, Songzhuang Art Museum, Beijing (2008).

Daniel McKewen, Running Men, 2008 (video still), three-channel HD video installation, looped, sound. Courtesy the artist and Milani Gallery, Brisbane. Photograph: Carl Warner