Presented at the MCA from 19 August until 2 November 2008, the exhibition features new and recent work by six artists who have been involved with video and screen-based artwork for a decade or more. The artists are Denis Beaubois, Philip Brophy, John Conomos, Adam Geczy, John Gillies and Eugenia Raskopoulos.

The featured artists have contributed substantially to the development of the medium in Australia and their work has been influential on subsequent generations of video artists.

Curated by Russell Storer, Video Logic explores a medium which has reached prominence in recent years. This has been attributed to a number of factors: from the growing sophistication and accessibility of video technology, to the ubiquity of the moving image in everyday life, and the art world’s insatiable desire for the new. In Australia this growing attention has been particularly through the work of a younger generation of artists such as Shaun Gladwell and TV Moore, yet it has had a long and rich history in this country, with artists working with video since at least the early 1970s..

Video dates back to the mid-1960s with the launch of the ‘Sony Portapak’ and has developed from its early incarnations of being an activist device, a kind of electronic ‘painting’, or a means of documenting performance art, to a very diverse and malleable medium.

Video art may be presented on a television monitor, as a room-scale projection or as part of an installation. It has expanded into numerous forms and drawn on countless references with artists calling upon photography, cinema, documentary, advertising and animation. Video Logic considers the ways that the featured artists bring a range of such approaches to video art – as well as connecting with disciplines such as performance, music and literature.

A catalogue has been produced to accompany the exhibition and features new writing on each artist. Brophy, Conomos and Geczy are also prominent theorists and critics in the field of video art, cinema and new media, and texts by each are featured alongside major essays by Stephen Jones, Jacqueline Millner and Bernice Murphy tracing the history and development of video art in Australia. The publication provides a context for the artists’ works and a unique and essential resource on the subject. -- www.mca.com.au