Shaun Wilson (born Melbourne, 1972) is an Australian artist, film maker, academic and curator working with themes of memory, place and scale through painting, miniatures and video art. He teaches digital media in the School of Design at RMIT University and exhibits inter/nationally at artist run spaces, university galleries, contemporary art centres and art/moving image museums.
Biography
Shaun Wilson studied Fine Arts at RMIT University (BFA) between 1992–94 and then Monash University (BFA hons) in 1995. In 2002 he moved to Hobart to undertake a PhD in Philosophy and Media Arts (completed in 2005) at the University of Tasmania. His dissertation was titled The Memory Palace: Scale, Mnemonics and the Moving Image, which translated the Roman mnemonic texts Ad herrenium and De memoria through video installation. In 2005 he moved back to Melbourne to work in the School of Creative Media at RMIT University, Melbourne where he specialises in the relationship between memory and place in the moving image and further, the role and theorisation of Video art after 2000. He has also been a visiting professor at the Hochschule der Medien Stuttgart in 2006.
Since 1995, Wilson has held over 40 solo exhibitions/screenings and 200 group exhibitions/screenings at notable galleries including the National Centre of Contemporary Art Moscow (2008), Australian Centre for Contemporary Art (2006), Bilbao Arte (2006), Center for Contemporary Culture Barcelona (2006), Presidential Government of the Canary Islands (2006), Thailand New Media Arts Festival 05 (2005), Australian Centre for the Moving Image (2005), Institute of Modern Art Brisbane (2004), 24hrArt: NT Centre for Contemporary Art (2004), and the Centre on Contemporary Art Seattle (2018).
Wilson has delivered over 55 guest lectures on contemporary art and video art throughout Australia and Europe. Video Art production includes the Uber memoria Series I-XX1 (2006–07) composed of 210 video paintings filmed in Germany, England, Scotland, U.S. and Australia and the Gothic memoria series I-VII (2006–07) composed of 1000 video paintings filmed in Germany, UK, New Zealand and Australia. In 2014 he published his first vampire novel The Gothic Memorium through iTunes.
Work
Painting
Wilson trained and worked as a painter throughout the 1990s undertaking medium and large-scale oil on canvas and also acrylic on vinyl paintings which addressed two concurrent themes: the politicalization of the image in the mass media and the politicalization of narrative in the mass media. Influences are drawn from Caravaggio, Théodore Géricault, Francisco Goya, the political works of Andy Warhol, Robert Rauschenberg, and the butterfly paintings of Damien Hirst.
Miniatures
Wilson began three noted series of miniatures: Crash, Disasters of Small, and The Empire of Small. These detailed works began as a response to the role of the scaled object in contemporary art and later evolved to embrace themes of memory and place through issues and tensions between narrativity. Materials used are both commercially manufactured model kits and scratch-built cardboard/plastic objects attached onto various types of vintage hard-cover books.
Video Art
Wilson began using video from 1998 onwards as a temporal response and extension to painting. Works produced are categorised into series and sub-series. Since 2004 he has produced over 350 video artworks under the titles of Mnemoria series, The Memory Palace series, Filmic Memorials series I-IV and Uber Memoria I-VII/Proto. These particular works that Wilson himself describes as 'video paintings' explore the nature of memory and place through the moving image and its subsequent effect on autobiographical memory. In doing so, Wilson has deconstructed family home movies, vintage 8mm film, and found 9mm film and from late 2006 onwards he has incorporated these filmic images with High Definition Video (HDV) to convey tensions of fractured memory. Film theorist Leon Marvell describes Wilson's later work in Photofile as 'an ambitious and exquisitely realised exploration of the tension between artifact and memory'[2] while other reviews, such as Diane Clausen in Realtime, have described his video art as 'hypnotic'[3]. Recent work examined how cinema and video art co-exist to what artist and writer Brendan Lee describes in Artlink as 'best illustrat[ing] how cinema can affect another medium and comment on it'[9].