‘Requiem’ by Adam Costenoble

(Via Em.)

Seen at Conical yesterday.

In Requiem, Costenoble presents a new video installation that basks in the failure of human aspiration. The video presents a lone dreamer equipped with faux-wings and helmet, seemingly prepared for flight. The man, already conscious of his innate failure to overthrow encumbrance, enacts a token gesture of absurd rebellion.

Succeeding in his personal quest to surpass human limitation is self-proclaimed hero of Liberty: Jet-Man, whose aerial exploits over the Swiss Alps starkly contrast with the lone dreamer’s feeble urban exercise. Evading the fate of Icarus, these men resentfully succumb to the repressive rule of nature, falling not to the sea below, but back down to the everyday human condition.

It was alright. Not without a certain resonance. Heh (sigh). But not in any way I’m particularly seeking to cultivate..

Adam Costenoble is a Sydney-based emerging artist whose practice to date has focused on video and interactive/user-dependant installation works, however, Costenoble considers himself a non-medium specific conceptual artist. A self confessed existentialist, Costenoble’s work draws on philosophy, literature and cinema that contemplates the human condition and the human experience in the physical world.

(Note to self: see art.)

8 thoughts on “‘Requiem’ by Adam Costenoble”

  1. The little video ‘mirror’ of him destroying the wings in the space was quite nice. But yeah, they weren’t nearly destroyed enough.
    The whole thing reminded me of Van Riquardt, the French patriot and pioneer airman who threw himself from the Eiffel Tower in 1889.
    That was what I liked best about it.
    (NB It’s a Falls thing.)
    (The Falls.. *dreamy sigh*..)

  2. I wasn’t that impressed by it either. I would have like to have seen him destroy the ‘wings’ as a performance in the gallery though. Sadly, at the opening the wings were already destroyed, in a very contrived fashion…

  3. arr, these is fightin words for a procrastinator like me (insert n more hours of aimlessly surfing internet here)

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