Little Pictures

Stephen Burstow, Little Pictures, 2015, single-channel screen installation, colour, sound, 2 min 51sec.

Exhibition: Sydney College of the Arts, Graduate School Gallery, University of Sydney, October, 2015. 

Proliferating into trillions, endlessly circulating, aggregated and analyzed as data: personal digital images appear to be quintessentially virtual objects. Yet, how do we understand the experiences of two people who share images face-to-face on a handheld screen?  The cool nowhere-land of the Facebook status update becomes a warm physical cocoon with a glowing image at its centre. 

To consider this phenomenon, Little Pictures juxtaposes an account of portrait miniatures from the year 1564 with faces displayed on smartphone screens.  On the soundtrack a narrator performs an excerpt from the memoir of Sir James Melville, ambassador to Mary Queen of Scots, sent on a mission to Mary’s cousin, Elizabeth I.  Elizabeth invites Melville to her bedchamber and reveals to him her collection of portrait miniatures, that become the dramatis personae in an intimate diplomatic performance. The charged space created by this portrait cabinet is paralleled on the image track by the small glowing screens of smartphones that project the faces of our contemporary intimates.