Painter, performance artist, video artist, Andy Petrusevics has been making his anachronistic brand of ideological observation and commentary under the e tag for many years. Petrusevics has an impressive handle on the processes of television production and early 20thC modernist histories. The works are littered with references to the TV aesthetics of B-grade 60's sci-fi, dada-esque typologies and contemporary psychological machinations. His video productions — video? tv? performance? — in particular transmit an oblique wit that appears at first glance heavy-handed and out of synch with the slick narratives of soap opera. Yet there remains something abiding about his take on the dumb forces of power: absurd, banal and funny.
"This is Ideological cinema presented as large as possible. ebelief is a meditation: an hypnotic trance created by edeology’. eBelief follows on from it’s predecessor ethink, shown at the AGSA in the Adelaide Biennial 2006. As ideological cinema or Edeology, the work takes a series of interlocking and simple mantras and creates the sleeping-awake of Orwell, consciously using the outmoded devices of Modernity" (Artist’s notes).
Image credits from top: Andy Petrusevics, e belief, Welcome to the party!; e belief at EAF, photos by Nicholas Folland; Andy Petrusevics, e belief cast
Andy Petrusevics's ebelief is part of the 2008 SALA Festival. The artist has been supported by a grant from ArtsSA
