Peter Newman

Born 1982, Kingswood
Bachelor of Electronic Arts (Hons)
Graduation show: 2003, 2004 (Hons)
Graduation ceremony: 2005

Artwork in Space YZ

The Waking Instant, 2003
Single channel video with audio 
18:07 mins

The Waking Instant, 2003 (excerpt)

The central image in this work was captured spontaneously on a night of gale-force winds in the Lower Blue Mountains in 2003, my third year at the art school. At the time I had been working on a series of evolving “video paintings”, creating slow, abstract video pieces from footage taken from the process of painting. I would then project the treated video back onto the canvas, continuing to paint into it while filming the results for future pieces. These generations and iterations became visual scores for a series of similarly evolving live sound performances, with fragments recorded from each performance feeding into the next.

When I projected an early treated version of the gale-force night vision footage at a Space Three performance with regular collaborator Matt Chaumont later that year, a lecturer in attendance strongly encouraged me to develop it into something more substantial. It became the basis for continuing iterations and performances, eventually becoming my major graduating work. “Painting into video” can be seen in the aurora that appears later in the piece. The audio is comprised of fragments of live performances from this period, traces of which continued to appear in future projects through my Honours year and beyond, including a series of concerts with Damo Suzuki and The Holy Soul in 2004, and also in Rosebud, an audio-visual composition that became the basis for a solo exhibition at Pelt Gallery in 2005.

Peter Newman is an Australian artist and musician who uses combinations of sound, video projections, paint, found objects and sculpted forms in his videos, installations and performances. His music has been described as "epic, sweeping digital post-rock, like My Bloody Valentine stretched, twisted, filtered and layered into a dreamscape..." (Shannon O'Neill, RealTime +OnScreen).

Peter has performed live both solo and in various group configurations at the Big Day Out, Berghain Kantine Berlin, Loophole Berlin, Sübkültür Bayreuth, Electrofringe, Liquid Architecture, impermanent.audio, Underbelly, Res Artis at Sydney’s Museum of Contemporary Art, the Demux launch at Performance Space, and elsewhere. He has performed or collaborated with a host of artists, filmmakers, dancers and musicians including Damo Suzuki (Can), The Holy Soul, Shu Lea Cheang, Jodi Rose, Erin Ellen Kelly, Jon Hunter, Ivan Lisyak, Matt Chaumont, Katrine Bregnum, Sumugan Sivanesan, Wade Marynowsky, Gail Priest, and Sam James, among others, and was a member of the primarily UWS-based Dysfunctional Feed collective.

Peter has exhibited solo at Canberra Contemporary Art Space, pelt, the Institute for Contemporary Art Newtown, Penrith Regional Gallery, and Firstdraft. His work has been featured in group exhibitions at Sydney’s Artspace, Performance Space, the Perth Institute of Contemporary Arts, Blacktown Arts Centre, Bathurst Regional Art Gallery, Mori Gallery, and more. Several of his audiovisual works have been screened in New York, Seoul, and Gwangju, South Korea.

Visit Peter Newman’s Instagram and YouTube.

Rosebud, 2005 (excerpt)