Aerial Perspective Retrospective

video, 2021

Aerial Perspective Retrospective documents the clandestine screening of three works during a 20 hour journey from Melbourne to Los Angeles during the COVID-19 pandemic. Filmed and edited by Camila Galaz. Works selected by Sabrina Baker. Originally premiered at Junior High, Los Angeles, June 23 2021, alongside a discussion with Christina Catherine Martinez.

Works screened:
- A Funeral in the Mountains, 2015
- You Transform Everything into a Boat, 2017
- Reparar Means to Repair, 2018

Sabrina Baker, curator:

This video documents the unfolding of Galaz’s retrospective in several parts, beginning with video of empty airports, bedecked with signage for social distancing, not a traveller sprawled on the floor in sight. We see the plane take off through the window and rows of empty seats, it’s eerily quiet compared to my memories of this same view. ‘A Funeral in the Mountains’ plays on an iPhone on the fold out tray, the video filmed in the mountains of California looks out over the landscape with a monologue and bagpipes as the soundtrack. It is an odd combination of views and perspectives as this expanse is condensed into the small screen of the iPhone within the sealed cabin of the plane as it passes over landscapes and oceans below. The bagpipes are particularly jarring, within the context of the plane as I imagine a plane at capacity, unwillingly an audience to this scene. However, I know this is not the case and I am aware of myself as a second-hand participant in this intimate screening. The work is both nostalgic as a memory of Galaz’s prior life in LA and those attending the wake within but also a prelude for what is to come upon landing.

Like waking from disjointed sleep, I can tell time has passed, the screen is somewhere new and we can see ‘You Transform Everything into a Boat’ with its bright blue surface and hands tying blue rope into knots. Shot from above, this perspective is heightened by the context in which we view it or rather in which this particular exhibition is viewed, always apparent as the surface endlessly jiggles and we glimpse reflections of the familiar ceiling of the cabin. For a third time the screen has shifted with Galaz holding it in front of the screen embedded in the back of the seat in front. ‘Reparar Means to Repair’ plays with the landscape blurring shot from the window of a car, in the background we see the trajectory of the plane as it nears its final destination before it cuts to the time since departure and back again. Travel, movement and time are layered within the work and the exhibition, which previously accessible and normal, now experiences or feelings lost to the endless pandemic. Again the artist is present, as the landscape goes dark entering a tunnel we see her and her camera in the screen’s reflection.

This is a small but simultaneously grand gesture, mounting a retrospective as she steadfastly pursues an internationally grounded life and career. Exhibiting work in what is now more than ever an exclusive space as international travel stalls for the near future. But, more importantly Galaz wields the expansive context of the sky as a space for transition, for possibility and to suspend art in time and space, a collage of beginnings, middles and endings hovering just out of reach of the chaos below.