Utilising the existing Streetvision screens on all Sydney city stations, Stevens’s video pieces disrupted the distribution and dissemination of information in these highly mediated environments. Consisting of five thirty second videos, these works combine animated text with a series of short sound bites. The text borrows from the sophisticated conventions of audio-visual advertising language. These phrases, isolated from their original context, are then pieced together to create discontinuous narratives. The videos enable the viewers to question their relationship with advertising and consider the underlying manipulation of desires and ideologies.

Biography
Grant Stevens employs text, image and sound in his video works. Words and phrases have been appropriated from various sources of pop culture - movie bylines, Woody Allen and Sci-fi flicks. Graphically simple white caps on black are screened in a perpetually looped series of statements and words, removed entirely from their original source. The never-ending tirade of dislocated commentary confounds the viewer’s sense of expectation completely, creating a mesmerising web of non-narratives and referential chaos. The familiarity of overused script lines, film lingo and predictable scenarios are collapsed to reveal a medley of triggers which ingeniously mirror the soundbyte culture which dictates and saturates our viewing pleasure. These videos bombard and perplex our sense of linearity, and we become inert receptors of a relentless and anxious visual noise.

Born in 1980, Brisbane.

Lives and works Brisbane

Represented by Gallery Barry Keldoulis, Sydney.

© Grant Stevens

Image credit Amanda Williams

© Grant Stevens