Seesaw-Magazine-is-on-pause-until-mid-2024.png
Article/Event

Visual arts: Open Water: The Offering

7 April 2017

  • Reading time • 2 minutes
  • More like this

 7 – 28 July @ Moana Project Space.
By Erin Coates & Anna Nazzari.

In “Open Water: The Offering” artists Erin Coates and Anna Nazzari incorporate underwater video, drawing and scrimshaw to portray their unique vision of an Australian Oceanic Gothic.

Taking a true event as a starting point, “Open Water: The Offering” is based on an incident that occurred in 1965 in the coastal town of Albany when a well-known whaler and gunner on The Cheynes III (a whale chaser) lost his leg after it became entangled in a rope attached to a harpoon fired at a whale. The film charts the imagined journey of a detached human leg, gifted to the Southern ocean and its inhabitants by an otherworldly cetacean. The exhibition builds upon Coates and Nazzari’s most recent foray into the Australian Oceanic Gothic, an internationally award-winning screen work: Cetaphobia, and draws from the existing knowledge of maritime histories, specifically those connected to Erin’s seafaring heritage and the whaling industry in Albany, Western Australia.

www.moana-ari.com

Open Water
Erin Coates and Anna Nazzari, Open Water: The Offering (still), 2017, HD video with stereo sound, 4:45, Sound design: Stuart James.

Like what you're reading? Support Seesaw.

Author —
seesawmag

Past Articles

  • WIN books by Anna Jacobs

    We have three books by author Anna Jacobs, signed exclusively, to giveaway to one lucky reader. Find out how to win here.

  • A human experience

    Daring and playful, Teac Damsa’s MÁM provides more than enjoyment, discovers young writer Alice Fittock.

Read Next

Leave a comment

Cleaver Street Studio

Cleaver Street Studio

 

Cleaver Street Studio