Threshold Art Space, Perth Concert Hall

After a blaze of tailor-made launch events, the Threshold art space in Perth is settling into its daily cycle. The town’s brand new, all singing, all dancing concert hall comes complete with the most up to date new media technology. In fact even the front door is an “interactive entrance box”, with a range of speakers activated by your movements.

Once you’ve thoroughly confused the automatic doors with your leaping about, you’ll find yourself in the light-filled foyer, watched over by a bank of 22 plasma screens spanning the length of the concert hall. These are the Threshold Wave.

The Threshold team have used open source software – free to anybody to reuse and modify – to programme the screens. Artists have made the most of this unique set-up to stretch their moving images as wide as they can go, or to mix and match different videos in a kaleidoscopic display.

Perhaps not surprisingly, given the format, the emphasis of most of the Threshold commissions is on landscape; forests and water appear more than once. The conventional proportions of the Threshold Stage make it an under-exploited add-on, as artists concentrate their efforts on the more enticing challenge of the Wave.

Hamilton and Ashrowan’s Landscape Symphony In 22 Movements leaves the most lasting impression. The artists visited Rumbling Bridge, where over a century ago, Pre-Raphaelite painter John Everett Millais spent months observing the waters before painting them. The pair have done the same, this time with video, slowing and stretching the rippling waters across the length of the Threshold Wave. The result is colourful, lyrical and hypnotic.

Steven Hendry’s Murder In Birnam puts the screens to work in a different way. Four central screens show MacBeth wandering the woods, while all around him the trees are closing in. The repetition and mirroring of these 18 trees on 18 screens creates a whole new dramatic device.

Dan Perjovschi’s “digital frescos” provide a counterpoint to the high-definition finesse of the other artists’ works. His darkly satirical doodles, made in black marker pen on paper, are sent to the venue over the internet like a news story over the wire. Flashing up on the bank of screens they have instant authority. For those who think that high-tech art spells the death-knell for traditional modes of art, Perjovschi’s drawings are here to prove otherwise.

Catrìona Black, Sunday Herald 09.10.05