Three elderly equines are bedecked in woven networks of bells and keys, trotting, grazing, jingling, and shaking in the Victorian bush. Horse Power is a gentle call to arms, against age’s invisibility and the slipping into silence of all species. It disrupts the art world's obsession with the fetishised horse and brings us back to Earth. Back to labour and real ageing bodies, away from the classical forms of the bourgeoisie.

Credits

Horses: Buster Rhythm, Breeze and Duke.

Cinematography: Andrew Kaineder.

Sound: Joseph Franklin.

Pattern Maker: Rioko Tega.

Equine Specialist: Sacajawea.

In UPRISE we see every drop, every swell, and watch the peaks crashing and colliding with the walls of the gallery. The water subsumes everything with an intensity that is frightening and makes clear that our current way of life is unsustainable. While we cannot stop the oceans from going where they will, we can choose to plan and design our cities and our resource consumption to adapt to the rising seas. By immersing us in this speculative deluge, UPRISE makes palpable the urgent need for action and insists we pay heed before our window of opportunity is washed away.

-Emma McRae 2019 Shifting Surrounds, Speculative Futures Catalogue

This work was filmed on a distant part of the south coast of Iceland amidst gale-force winds and rain. During their time in this area, Peachey & Mosig felt a strong sense of connection to geological time. During a relatively short period in the eighteenth century, geologists changed the basic premise of existence when they theorised that the Earth’s lifetime did not consist of some six thousand years and instead existed on timescales that are so immense they resist the imagination. This was not a new idea, many ancient traditions have always asserted that the universe is not only much larger than what we see but also much older.

Luscombe’s Itchy IOUs presents skewed environments and absurd characters in highly plausible predicaments. She seems to be having fun with a reality that is not funny at all. In doing so, Luscombe provides a commentary on the primacy of debt in our conscious lives—the way it invades our emotional, professional, and creative worlds. Similar to a pantomime, the video production was conceived with both musicians and actors performing live alongside one another during filming, to see if this produced a more humorous collective atmosphere. Chicago-based artist and musician Chris Wood composed and performed the music and many ‘Ka-Ching!’ sounds live on set. Itchy IOUs brings together a rich ensemble of performers including a former Power Ranger (Li-Ming Hu); a life hack wizard (Harmony Zhang); a puppeteer of puppets of all shapes and sizes (Kyle Bellucci Johanson); and a voice-over expert (Dominique James) to ensure a comedic madness that is necessary to survive the financial and psychic turmoil that has led up to this cultural moment.

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