Peter Panning through Time and Space
The aim is to balance the terror of being alive with the wonder of being alive.
― Carlos Castaneda
The Boomerang Generation is one way the current generation of young adults in Western cultures has been defined. If you’ve ever finished Zelda on Nintendo 64 you’re probably one of the socio-economic statistics who falls into this demographic along with Heath Franco. After an extended period of study or maybe of working a menial job, allegedly members of this demographic are likely to return home, possibly for economic reasons to live or perhaps in quest of spiritual or philosophical enlightenment, searching for an individual and meaningful identity away from fast food, Michael Moore and the warm fuzziness of a well-worn couch. The boomerang will always return to the place from which it came.
The love of the video game is one of the most definitive characteristics of the Boomerang Generation. The video game is a physical manifestation of tedium garnished by fleeting moments of elation. Like having an orgasm with someone you loathe, its completion brings about a guilty lethargy and acute feelings of emptiness. The video game is a beginning and end to nothingness. A way to throw a curve ball from the comfort of the couch into the game of the mundane. Immersing yourself in cinema is another. Nothing like the razzle, the dazzle and the dirty Russel Crowe to occupy the space between rolling around in bed and staring at the wall.
Franco’s latest work, HOME TOWN fuses cinematic poeticism, with familiar video game tropes. Travelling to Berridale, the town Franco called home until the age of eleven, he was enamoured by the landscape, which for one reason or another had never before seemed beautiful to the infantile Franco. Taking cues from tinsel town and the majesty of the long, extended landscape shot, a certain grandeur emerges from the setting. As in any practice (including the practice we so confidently ascertain to be art), Franco pries significance from the everyday until it becomes the spectacular. Never take things at face value. Never trust a fart when you’re drunk.
Franco minus the gallery is just a boy who grew up in rural NSW, likes video games, adventure films and dressing up. Link (Zelda’s hero) minus the ocarina is just a lost bunch of pixels in the Deku Forest. The “crossroads to the Snowy” minus the miners passing through on the way to the gold mines is just Franco’s home town of Berridale. The landscape minus the cinematic persuasion is just the banal.
A good Christian from Berridale might tell you they don’t make heroes out of warlocks or that the backyard philosopher from down the road is just an old drunk but in Franco’s world, where time and space appear infinitely malleable and pregnant with possibility, the promise of salvation is a mere porthole away. Franco’s characters never seem to exist in the realm of the living but are all too familiar with its parameters, dropping truth bombs on those who seek them out as a bitter counterpart to the everyday.
Like watching a film with Nicholas Cage which is both repulsive and compelling, HOME TOWN offers rare insight into the lunacy of a schizoid generation trying to understand the foundations on which it is built. We are left with the feeling that the video game, cinema and art are all just curious ways pass time. Ways to morph madness into meaning.
Victoria Maxwell
February 2014
The Australian Artists’ Grant is a NAVA initiative, made possible through the generous sponsorship of Mrs Janet Holmes à Court and the support of the Visual Arts Board, Australia Council for the Arts.
Photos: Docqment
