Fan Mashups
This work is a series of three videos made by editing and reassembling ‘found’ online covers of popular songs. Each mashup is a new rendition made from the collective voices of ordinary people. They comprise personal interpretations, tributes, or imitations of a well-known song, performed by people in the sanctuary of their bedrooms and lounge rooms and then posted through video channels to an anonymous global audience. These people have most likely never met, though they are united both in their shared performance of a familiar tune. By selecting and editing key scenes from the original videos and making my own arrangements, each mashups is my own cover version. In this way, the work explores the power of music and media to bring people together. As an intimate rendition of an iconic tune, performed by strangers for ‘everyone’, such videos are a new mode of cultural expression and social exchange that urges us to reconsider the relationship between the familiar and the unknown.
Fan Mashups was first screened at M16 as part of the exhibition Faded Crush, an exhibition of video and photomedia-based prints exploring fandom, celebrity and desire expressed through popular music cultures. Fan Mashups, like the show Faded Crush, focuses on the personal experiences and emotions that underpin the mass-production and consumption of popular music. It reflects on the relationship between fame and anonymity and the iconic and mundane by engaging with ideas of fandom and the vernacular expressions generated through the listening experience. Touching on themes of memory, projection, nostalgia and life as theatre, these works reflect my interest in everyday expression and my ongoing practice of finding new ways to work with ideas and materials that already exist in the world.
In 2019 I was invited to show an encore screening of my 2017 video work Fan Mashups in gallery 2 of M16 Artspace.