“I tell you most solemnly”
Kieran Boland
1 June → 23 June 2012

What year did Jesus think it was? – George Carlin

If the medium is at least partly the message, a public preacher’s invariable lack of success in reaching anyone at all suggests that he needs to examine his delivery. Like it or not he needs to examine his own role as a performer and take acting classes. If he is to avoid becoming just another street entertainer though, what acting approach should he choose? Perhaps ‘the method’ proposed by Stansilavski would best suit the process of redemption and transformation he speaks of?

In a video installation set in and around Melbourne’s CBD, we witness two preachers at work. The preachers are continuously put to the test by a literal rain of canned laughter whenever they read passages from the Bible featuring the phrase ‘I tell you most solemnly’. We also witness the preachers as the raw material from which they have been transformed; that being the two actors who play them. The preachers are forever fixed in time and space in their attempts to spread the good word. The actors however are teleported or ‘beamed up’ to safety at the end of every scene, like the characters in the short lived 1960’s television show “The Time Tunnel” once were.

Kieran Boland is a Melbourne-based artist who recently completed an MFA at Monash University. His work is interdisciplinary, often exploring transitional relationships between drawings, text and audio-visual narratives. Recent solo shows include Run it by me, First Spare Room @ RMIT Project Space (2011) and When you’re in love with a beautiful woman, BUS Projects Screen Space (2011). Recent group exhibitions and screenings include Loop Video Festival, Barcelona Spain (2011), Beautiful Volcanoes, Monash University Faculty Gallery (2011), Cinesonika, Simon Fraser University, Vancouver Canada (2012).