Shaun Gladwell

Australia, b1972
Gladwell’s slow-motion images focus our attention on his protagonists’ movements – riding, skateboarding, dancing, usually through urban environments. His work often taps into youth culture, exploring masculinity and what it’s like to live at the threshold of different worlds, while at the same time drawing on art history, particularly the representation of the figure in landscape and the physical and psychological experience of place.

Approach to Mundi Mundi 2007

This dual-screen video is part of the ongoing MADDESTMAXIMVS series. As well as referencing the Mad Max film trilogy, the series explores the dynamics of place. In this work, a lone rider appears to embrace the land. Although he is positioned as our point of focus, we can’t see his face and can only imagine what he sees and what lies directly ahead. Paradoxically moving yet also still, the work presents a type of extended moment, seeming to ‘swallow’ time as dawn moves into day.

View Approach to Mundi Mundi in the collection