| A graduate of Oxford University and the Royal College of Art, London, I undertook scholarships in Paris, New York, Tokyo, and Rome, before settling in Melbourne, Australia, in 2002. I mainly work with found-object-based sculpture, installation, digital animation and Web-derived imagery. My recent work addresses the representation of the desired, transcultural and increasingly virtual ideal city, understood as a consequence of globalization, and often defined in an ambiguous relationship to nature. The “ideal city” is used as a motif to explore the landscapes associated with civilization and paradise, often also the site or matrix of desire for the exotic Other. |  |
Kit Wise
A graduate of Oxford University and the Royal College of Art, London, I undertook scholarships in Paris, New York, Tokyo, and Rome, before settling in Melbourne, Australia, in 2002. I mainly work with found-object-based sculpture, installation, digital animation and Web-derived imagery. My recent work addresses the representation of the desired, transcultural and increasingly virtual ideal city, understood as a consequence of globalization, and often defined in an ambiguous relationship to nature. The “ideal city” is used as a motif to explore the landscapes associated with civilization and paradise, often also the site or matrix of desire for the exotic Other. My work draws upon theories of appropriation and “mash-up” digital practices to present composite, fantastical hyperreal scenes that borrow sources such as medieval narrative painting, traditional Japanese ukiyo-e landscapes and science fiction cinema.
My early cityscapes are based on the experiences of the traveler arriving in a foreign city late at night and grappling with the uncertain—based in part on personal first experience of arriving in Australia. The cityscapes are an attempt to document, for example, the experience of the familiar and the exotic being thrown together in the crude cocktail of jetlag—the result of 30 hours spent looking out of the window of a plane, the night expanding in slow motion, familiar and then alien cities appearing below, made equal by the accelerated viewpoint.Much of my recent work has consisted of architectural-scale digital transparencies, projection screens on wall-mounted light boxes. Often engulfing or circumnavigating the gallery walls, the light boxes create panoramic vistas of juxtaposed cityscapes. A combination of photographs taken by me, tourists, amateur photographers, and municipality commissioned publicity shots, the cityscape images are predominantly downloaded from the Internet, bringing together international urban centers with the local and parochial, and condensing them into a whole. I try to present invisible cities of the floating world: possible scenes glimpsed during rapid transit through the neoreal, plastic-fantastic cityscape of the contemporary city, skimming the infinite but empty surface of the collective urban imaginary.
