Viewers of Heath Franco’s typically multi-channel video works might share the same mixed emotions as the young boy in Kurosawa’s film: should I stay or should I go? Should I be sensible or should I satiate my curiosity? Should I return to what is safe and comfortable or strike out and seek the unknown? Franco studied drawing and painting at Sydney’s College of Fine Arts last decade before stepping off into the unknown – first making strange prop-like objects such as teeth, and then more elaborate costumes and wearable sculptures. But it was while in England on a residency in 2009 that Franco flung himself into the dark abyss of video – dark because of the black hole of digital technology he had to learn and improvise on the run, and dark because of the endless house-of-mirror effects the medium could offer him as an artist-performer. From FUN HOUSE (2010) to WUNDER CLOSET and YOUR DOOR (both 2011), Franco looks with child-like eyes at the games adults play. Often luridly coloured like porn, they invite voyeurism and deny full disclosure. Paraded kaleidoscopically before our eyes are the types of weirdly presented people we were told to stay away from as kids. From their manic holding patterns on screen they talk to us, unintelligibly at first, until we begin to discern the pattern of their mantras. Then we lean in to listen.

Since first watching Yume soon after graduating from art school, Franco hasn’t stopped thinking about the boy in Kurosawa’s film:

Menacing but magical and a little forbidden  – I guess that’s what I want people to feel: Should I be seeing this as a secret? And I think back to the most exciting points in my life when I had those feelings as well – being scared but excited. When I was about 8 we found a porno mag in a paddock in the country where I used to live, and we’d gather round and there’d be this unbelievable excitement, and just seeing all these things and thinking: “Oh wow, that’s what adults keep away from us.” Those moments I think about when I’m trying to make a work.*

In the middle section of “Sunshine Through Rain”, the young boy treads warily through the forest, dwarfed by its giant canopy of trees and drawn by its misty sun-dappled light. Through the mist a procession emerges, and from behind a tree the boy watches on. Slowly the figures walk past, human in scale, draped and behatted in traditional wedding costumes though, seen in profile, the boy can make out their furry fox noses. There is a sweet suspension of disbelief and then the foxes spring around. The boy realises he has been seen and runs away.

Through his videos Franco streams a procession of characters, often half-animal, and each connected to the other for the simple reason they are all performed by the artist himself. Franco typically begins with a stage-like prop or item of clothing and his characters are often inspired by the sundry folk he has glimpsed from across the bar at the tavern where he has worked in Sydney’s western suburbs. His characters often say the same thing over and over, like someone cornered drunk in a pub, but they are no better or worse than you and I. Their foibles and frailties are just more brightly displayed – as if under the harsh pub lighting at closing time.

The vivid life force of his characters can’t be contained and often spill over from one film to the next. In his recent video DREAM HOME Rainbow (2012), seven assorted characters are placed around a doll-like house, suggesting a world within a world. A human-headed rainbow slowly moves across the perfect blue sky, entrapping the house and its occupants but also, perhaps, setting them free. In his latest dual-channel work DREAM HOME (2012), some of these characters reappear. There’s the silver-spangled figure beckoning with a timepiece wrapped around his white-gloved hand. And the sad grey-suited clown gently cradling a furry orange creature with shocking yellow teeth. Though perhaps most alarming of all is the freckled figure with red corkscrew curls caught in a cruel game of co-dependency with his doll. Not that Franco’s folk don’t seek escape from their own private prisons, and in DREAM HOME they are transported, as if magically, from one screen to the next – time travellers in Franco’s warped universe, seeking release through the deferment of our judgment and the possibility of forgiveness:

Not all the characters are good, and not all of them are interesting, and most of them aren’t deep at all. What they’re doing – that’s it. There’s really nothing more to them. Some people have said my videos are like living paintings. I still think that’s possibly true.

At the conclusion of “Sunshine Through Rain”, the little boy returns home to find his angry guardian waiting for him. “You went out and saw something you shouldn’t have,” she tells him. “I can’t let you in now.” Once again the boy is caught on the threshold, as if between dream and reality. His guardian goes on to tell him how he must go and ask for the foxes’ forgiveness before he can be allowed back inside the house. “But I don’t know where they live,” the boy complains. “You’ll find out,” she replies. “On days like this there are always rainbows. Foxes live under rainbows.” And so the film ends with the boy walking through a field of flowers, pausing to take in the scene unfolding before his eyes: A rainbow arcing across a dark mountain valley. He walks on, subsumed by this shifting field of light.

Like Kurosawa, Heath Franco looks beyond the banal to find a universe of terrifying possibilities – and one leavened by magic. For the unsuspecting visitor to the suburban house of YOUR DOOR, it’s there in the welcome mat which harbours a wondrous doe-eyed sprite, or the ocelot-patterned teacup that unleashes a leopard-skinned minx. And in DREAM HOME it’s there in the magic carpet-like flourishes of the blue downloading bar that opens up our perception of time and space, unzipping it.

In the end Franco hopes that we, like his DREAM HOME denizens, can believe in life under the rainbow:

I’m not really religious at all, but to think that there’s something magical underlying everything – it is a pleasing feeling and it puts you more at ease with life, about how fucked up it is. Yeah, I like to think that there could be things like that – that there could be potentially a universe inside an atom.

As with the boy at the end of Kurosawa’s film, it all seems so tantalisingly close. And then, as abruptly as it began, the dream ends.

Michael Fitzgerald

• All quotes by the artist are drawn from a conversation with the author in Sydney, 12 May 2012.