
David Egan, Green Seeks Little Attention
⬤ Haydens 5 Nov - 4 Dec 2021
David Egan’s fifteen-minute-long video work, Crying Room (2019), immediately greets me as I walk into Haydens, a commercial gallery housed in a large Brunswick East warehouse complex. The solo exhibition, Green Seeks Little Attention, is the examinable outcome of Egan’s PhD research project. In the comparatively small front space, I sit down on what I recognise as a pew-like bench taken from the Fine Art post-graduate studio at Monash University. The video begins. I’m being sermonised by artist Ander Rennick (credited as Priest): “A voice says, ‘Cry out,’ and I ask, ‘What shall I cry out?’ All people are like grass and all their faithfulness is like the flowers of the field”. From behind the pulpit, Priest’s intoning seems important, and I diligently try to decode his meaning while continuing to listen. Acolyte (played by Brennan Olver aka musician Wet Kiss) sits quietly behind the Priest; between them sits a monolithic, green-marbled table. Priest continues, guiding us, his flock, with rhetorical questions and metaphors about nature, colours, time, life and death. He has the power to make numbers appear in the air as he lists them: a bright red “5” flashes, followed by a purple “8.”. “… The word of our God will stand forever,” he concludes. And looks up with a self-satisfied: “Amen”.