Velvet GLoves
-16mm film
-Erotic night lights
-16mm film
-Erotic night lights
Velvet Gloves is a 16mm film and video work that fosters voyeuristic and suspended moments of touch that have been inspired by the journey, ethos, and opening of Hedon House: a queerly-conceived, lovingly-crafted playspace, kink haven, fuck palace, bathouse, garden, healing space, inner urban retreat built for hedonism and new to Melbourne. Parallel to purposeful spacemaking, analogue film is a mode of industrial resistance: a filmmaker kink, a masochistic and hedonistic desire for grain over pixels, reactionary in its slow and manual analogue film processes. These intersecting politics of withdrawal are explored to arrive at a slow-motion alternative found in play.
The exhibition at MARS Gallery, Melbourne sits in dialogue with Brie Trenerry’s neighbouring work for MARS which explores the profound implications of artificial intelligence (AI); in contrast Woodnutt’s exhibition considers analogue film as a return to the physical, a commitment to in-body experiences and tactility. Within the film’s world, a physical relationship is explored with a house, its contents, and its people; it foregrounds a material connection to touch which is human at heart and playful. Velvet Gloves is crafted by hand: shooting, developing, printing, and editing 16mm film via hand-made analogue processes, scanned and presented as digital projection.
The accompanying wall mounted night lights expand the work to the domestic space, framing a selection of backlit, 16mm still frame images (10mm x 16mm). When relocated to a home, these night lights act as beacons of the erotic, beacons of the body, glowing from the walls as you brush past them in the night. Nightlights here act just as lighthouses call for ships, sirens for sailors; the premonition of the softly lit erotic mind waits upon the walls for the body to follow.
The exhibition at MARS Gallery, Melbourne sits in dialogue with Brie Trenerry’s neighbouring work for MARS which explores the profound implications of artificial intelligence (AI); in contrast Woodnutt’s exhibition considers analogue film as a return to the physical, a commitment to in-body experiences and tactility. Within the film’s world, a physical relationship is explored with a house, its contents, and its people; it foregrounds a material connection to touch which is human at heart and playful. Velvet Gloves is crafted by hand: shooting, developing, printing, and editing 16mm film via hand-made analogue processes, scanned and presented as digital projection.
The accompanying wall mounted night lights expand the work to the domestic space, framing a selection of backlit, 16mm still frame images (10mm x 16mm). When relocated to a home, these night lights act as beacons of the erotic, beacons of the body, glowing from the walls as you brush past them in the night. Nightlights here act just as lighthouses call for ships, sirens for sailors; the premonition of the softly lit erotic mind waits upon the walls for the body to follow.
Melody Woodnutt, Velvet Gloves still images, size of print negotiable, archival pigment print from 16mm still frame, 2023.