© Peter NEWMAN
Free At Last
| Artist | Peter NEWMAN |
|---|---|
| Year | 1997 |
| Material/ Technique | video |
| Size/ Duration | 7 min. |
| Copyright Notice | © Peter NEWMAN |
| Year of acquisition/ donation | 2000 |
| Description | Born in London, UK in 1969. Lives and works there. Peter Newman works in sculpture, video, photography, painting and other wide-ranging media. Newman’s works include long, horizontal photos of smoke trails from airplanes, and video installations showing footage of a surfer who lost his life trying to ride a legendary colossal wave. Newman employs natural phenomena such as light, water and sky together with elements of modern civilization such as airplanes and rockets. Giving play to our psychological perceptions of such things, he explores an unknown territory transcending space and time, while closely examining human existence in the physical world. This is a seven-minute video work of a man skydiving. Leaping into space and giving himself to gravity, the diver freefalls at high speed and, in these extreme circumstances, adopts a yoga pose. Skydiving is an act of opening one’s senses to the outer world in a state of excitement, while yoga meditation is a spiritual act of looking inward. Both share in common a desire for insight into the nature of human existence in the world. Then, since the cameraman is also falling as he films, our sense of up/down/right/left becomes confused, and it comes to look like a video of a man floating suspended in space. Despite its dramatic scenic development, the video is soundless, and this soundlessness dilutes the reality of the events appearing before us, so that we are drawn into a world in which the preconceptions up/down / right/left do not exist. The title of this work, “Free At Last,” symbolically implies the video’s final scene, where the diver disappears in the blue sky, as if flying into the unknown. |
NOTES
This Collection Data page contains the works and materials in the collection of 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa, as of April 1, 2018.
Artists are listed alphabetically by artist’s surname.
Works and materials by the same artists are listed according to the date of the work in principle.
Works whose dates are unidentified are listed at the end of each item. Some works are not listed according to the date of work due to their relations.
The data of works and materials are listed in order of title, production year, material/technique/form, dimensions, donor’s name, copyright holder and credit for photograph.
Dimensions are given by height (H) x width (W) in centimeters for plane work, and height (H) x width (W) x depth (D) in cm for 3-D work. Diameter (Ø) is used for circular work.
For the name of country or city, the name currently used in English is listed in principle.