PELAGIC STATES

Sam Trubridge

The pelagic term describes that part the ocean not defined by its proximity to the sea bed, coastlines, or the surface: a space of constant movement, liquidity, and change.

An exhibition of fragments of performance works and projects conducted in spaces of growth, change, reflux, and liquidity. Trubridge attempts to capture the fleeting quality of working with nomadic, fluid, and evasive media using a collection of drawings, spatial interventions, and video documents installed in the Engine Room gallery. The works range across a variety of locations: from the interior of nomadic plants, to a farming station in the Murray River Basin, across a remote salt lake, and diving to the sea floor in The Bahamas. In each place a state of liquefaction, complex three-dimensionality, migration, and constant motion is examined in dialogue with the natural rhythms and cultural histories of that space. 

Works featured include the performance-walk Night Walk,  and Many Breaths (to lift an anchor from the sea bed) where the artist invited free diving athletes to help lift an anchor from under the Caribbean Sea. Videos and artefacts examine the difficulty of reinvoking these original performances, but also capture various planned and unplanned failures that are intrinsic to these works: their failure to remain, their failure to last, their failure to function as planned, or their inevitable failure of an unsustainable action repeated in unforgiving environments. 

The performance work many breaths (to lift an anchor from the sea bed) was developed in the Deep Anatomy symposium in The Bahamas, 2015. In collaboration with freediving athletes competing in the annual Vertical Blue championship (‘the Wimbledon of freediving’ – NY Times) the artist attempts to lift an anchor from the sea floor using their combined breath. 
https://theplaygroundnz.com/many-breaths-to-lift-an-anchor-from-the-sea-bed/

Night Walk is a performance walk first developed at the Interpretive Wonderings symposium 2015 in collaboration with Culpra Milli Aboriginal Corporation. A large sphere is constructed from black plastic rubbish bags, inflated in situe, then walked into the landscape until it is torn apart, deflated, or blown away.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MVxf-qt6aLc 

https://www.samtrubridge.com/performance-art