An Unkindness of Ravens, a new moving-image installation by Gabrielle Amodeo, deals with the performance of the objects of pause. This intriguing subject is worked through by protagonists in action, paralysed by time.

In filmmaking or drama, a script and a recording bookend a performance: two points of stillness that open and close an act, and everything at play.  The script’s iteration fulfills its intention, but it is an inherently passive object; it waits to be acted.  A recording, on the other hand, documents the act and waits to be seen. The script sits poised ahead of speech and the recording recollects.
 
Amodeo exhibits both bookends in our Auckland gallery space, where our gallery and nature - the loading up of film histories -  completes the construction of a triangle between the two works and the Film Archive. One work is based on the penultimate gunfight from The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (1966). Amodeo takes the protagonists of this dusty Spaghetti Western and forces them to perpetually continue their standoff, quietly, yet disquietingly, staring at each other across the space.
 
The other work exhibited is a personal take on pause, a moment in family history frozen by time and represented by a document – the script.

“After his death, when clearing out his house, Mum found Uncle Roger’s furled script from a 1960 school production of Wind in the Willows in which he starred as Toad.  Illicitly unreturned and then kept by him for fifty-one years, this script is a record of breath expended, words spoken, lines acted.”
-Gabrielle Amodeo