AUTOSCAPE MEGAPROJECT
(2025)
(2025)
Bailey Florence, AUTOSCAPE MEGAPROJECT, 2025
Three channel video, sound. 8:18 min. Installation view, VCA GRADSHOW. Photo: Bailey Florence.
AUTOSCAPE: an environment designed for and dominated by the motor vehicle. Sprawling across cities, these landscapes are hostile to life. Oppressive automotive architectures construct unnavigable wastelands all around us, restricting human/non-human autonomy and eroding tangible relationships between people and place.
Engaged in constant fieldwork, my practice seeks to understand the sensory, spatial, and kinetic realities experienced by interlopers in the Autoscape. I walk and ride deep into these zones, recording visual, thermal, audio and sensory data; my art is the material result of this fieldwork. Using an industrial thermal camera, I document my experiences as an interloper in concrete capital. The unstable handheld footage is punctuated by the constant rhythm of the heat seeking crosshair darting across the frame, searching for traces of human and nonhuman life.
I spend substantial time in the mud pit beneath Melbourne International Gateway, where sediment from the Moonee Ponds creek is caught in a concrete basin. Access is needed to the base of the beams for reinforcement works, so periodically a tractor scrapes the mud into mounds which form islands amongst the polluted basin - an ironic sisyphean task in the shadow of the high-speed salute to Kennet era neoliberalism.
Bailey Florence, AUTOSCAPE MEGAPROJECT, 2025
Three channel video, sound. 8:18 min. Installation view, VCA GRADSHOW. Photo: Bailey Florence.
Bailey Florence, AUTOSCAPE MEGAPROJECT, 2025
Three channel video, sound. 8:18min. Installation view (details), VCA GRADSHOW. Photos: Bailey Florence.
Three channel video, sound. 8:18 min. Installation view , VCA GRADSHOW. Photo: Leon Rice-Whetton
Bailey Florence, AUTOSCAPE MEGAPROJECT, 2025
Three channel video, sound. 8:18 min. Installation view (detail), VCA GRADSHOW. Photo: Leon Rice-Whetton