Preview Brett Chan's 'Rescue The Future' China Heights Exhibition
"I would like to see, without it sounding too cheesy, mankind get its shit together."
Pro skater and artist Brett Chan is launching his exhibition at China Heights gallery tomorrow night in Sydney. Called 'Rescue The Future', the exhibition brings together multi-dimensions and multi-medias, including painting, drawing, and the premiere of a short CGI film. Brett created 'fantastic epic' Gunslinger & The Girl in collaboration with skateboard filmer Jason Morice, and it looks AWESOME. See for yourself...
We dropped by the gallery to speak with Brett as he was setting up the show and eating a mandarin.
Ingrid Kesa: Do you feel ready for the show?
Brett Chan: Yeah, more than ready. Luckily Jen from The Paramount Building let me use one of the empty offices they've got over there so I had a beautiful space in that 1950s building to do all the work in and party on the rooftop. It's pretty nice up there, just next to the Vice offices. Yeah, everything's going ahead, we've been working on this film for quite awhile now.
I really liked the trailer.
It's funny, hey. I think that'll be the thing that'll blow most people away because that's the medium that is the most freshest and it's taking the newer technologies into, like, a fantasy realm, into an artistic realm.
How did you do all the special effects?
I got a good friend of mine Jason, who is the boss on that shit, to do it, and he spent the last six months doing it, but obviously not every day because he's got a regular life and a regular job. We filmed everything at the beginning of last summer, so we've just been ticking away at it whenever we've got time. He is amazing, completely amazing. We used the song that I had recorderd even half a year earlier than that... Because it's a story-song, it sort of describes the...
The narrative?
Yeah, the narrative.
How long does the film go for?
It's about six minutes, I think.
Where will you be showing it?
In here. So this is getting all blanked-out and then a projector will be playing on a drop screen here. That should be quite cool, and then I'm going to try to have the skate video I made, Ruthless, playing down at the area down at the other end [of the gallery] where everyone smokes ciggies and hangs out and whatever.
Do you have dystopic or optimistic thoughts about the future?
I have optimistic thoughts about the future. I would like to see — without it sounding too cheesy — mankind get its shit together, y'know. We're living on this planet that's floating through space and it's such a precarious situation. Although I'm never going to have children myself, I can imagine that in two generations what they're going to have to be dealing with and it's f— [decides not to swear]... pretty scary. I think ultimately, whether there's a mass culling or people actually get more onto it [ie getting their shit together] or some disease breaks out that wipes out people, people will get onto it, it's probably just going to take some impact to prompt them.
But then you also think, "What needs to happen?" because so much terrible shit already goes on... Is it about us being exposed to more truths, or banding together to take action against the destructive things we're doing to people and the planet?
I think that because everything's accerlerating — like the magnetic fields of the solar system as it's rotating through the galaxy are shifting and changing quite dramatically — the earth as a planet is changing, and because we live on that planet we're not very good at adapting and so it's throwing us off... There's a lot of changes that wouldn't naturally occur, it's just that we've chosen to build cities or whatever in not very strategic environments and so therefore it seems catastrophic, but really it's just the natural order of things.
Ingrid Kesa
