Rob​ert McDougall

McKean Study #2 and #3 were part of a video surveillance project in 2012 concerning a small suburban alleyway in Fitzroy North, Victoria. Minimal in conception and realization, the video work is a durational meditation on the shifting nature of human perception, and the ways in which changes in awareness and ocular sensitivity affect our relationship to the lived space around us, and its history. The site was chosen because of its significance to the location of the Hoddle Street Massacre of 1987, an event etched into the memories of the local community yet fading into the quiet space of nightmarish legend and myth.

This alleyway was where, at 22:13pm on August 9th 1987, Julian Knight was cornered by two police officers and arrested after a short gunfight, having lost the final bullet intended for his suicide. In the context of the horrors of that event and how they haunt the present, the video series was intended to explore the way we access and relate to historical memory and trauma, and how our everyday awareness conditions this. Memory as ephemera and detritus, yet a gateway to living myth. Perception as the placement of attention upon a place, until the energy of that place reveals itself. Indebted to the long-take structural film lineage of Michael Snow, James Benning and Sharon Lockhart, the work’s power is in its pace, subtlety and patience.