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The Winter Night Screen is an annual program of moving images projected onto the Brunswick Town Hall window after dark.

Curated by Nicola Bryant for the lockdown of 2020, Nearness of the Distant features four women artists in precarious balance: Cate Consandine, Yandell Walton, Kawita Vatanajyankur and Simone Slee.

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Amidst the visual and aural clamour of the Sydney Road streetscape, viewers can bear witness to private moments of personal isolation and endurance in Nearness of the Distant.

In Kawita Vatanajyankur’s Carrying Pole (2015), the artist is suspended like a set of scales while bananas are thrown into woven baskets that hang off her body. As the fruits pile up, the scale works to gauge the artist’s physical and mental strength – a challenge that is both compelling and uncomfortable to watch. The day-glow pink background contrasts with the undercurrents of violence in this heightened performance of a domestic chore.

In Cate Consandine’s A Woman of the Future (2016), a woman wanders the twilit South Australian desert; she locks hands with a man and spins. He stumbles and falls; she walks into the lavender landscape alone.

Yandell Walton frequently explores ideas of impermanence, environmental fragility, and human impact on ecological systems, using projection to transpose imagery across physical spaces.

Teetering between balance and collapse, Simone Slee’s Rocks happy to help: hold up, hold down by Simone Slee is both mesmerising and stressful as she explores the role of materials and how things hold up.

1 – 7 August: A Woman of the Future, 2016, by Cate Consandine
8 – 14 August: Submerged, 2017, by Yandell Walton
15 – 21 August: Carrying Pole, 2015, by Kawita Vatanajyankur
22 – 28 August: Rocks happy to help: hold up, hold down, 2017, by Simone Slee