Medium: Twin channel video (Super 8 film transferred to high definition video)

Duration: 10 mins 14 secs

Shot entirely on super 8 film, Every Public House On the Parramatta Line (EPH) is a fluid and impressionistic interpretation of the landscape directly adjacent to the train line that runs between Central and Parramatta, and Parramatta and Central. These two journeys are portrayed through a pair of discreet though interrelated films that simultaneously occupy the extended screen space of the gallery.

This project employs two distinct modes of visual representation: fleeting, hand held footage shot from a moving train contrasted with more studied architectural footage that investigates a selection of pubs that can be spotted from the railway. These hotel buildings, largely remnants of the previous century, often stand in sharp historical and stylistic contrast to the surrounding built environment. It is intended that this sense of historical rupture is further promoted by the use of film-based media within the project. A sense of the uncanny pervades the project as the present is drawn through the appearances and poetics of the past.

Integral to this work is a soundtrack created for the project by musician/composer John Encarnacao. The soundtrack at once intensifies the imagery while lending a logic to the structure of the two screen spaces. It can be heard via wireless headphones provided in the exhibition space.

While these train journeys provide an easily apprehended and seemingly natural narrative structure to the work, this structure is invariably tested by the sense of psycho-geographic drift that pervades. Rather than providing closure by arriving at a final destination EPH asks the viewer to contemplate the journey and its attendant architectural forms as a type of unresolvable evidence.