“La Folla Oceanica (The Oceanic Mass)”
Kit Wise
10 Oct → 8 Nov 2014

This new work will explore the crowd as panorama, using found footage of crowd scenes in times of disaster, ecstasy and political protest. 

Fascist design of the early twentieth century, as found in the visual languages of magazines such as Rivista Illustrata del Popolo d’Italia (1920s), established a genre of crowd scene imagery called 'mass panorama', or la folla oceanica (the oceanic mass). Originating in the eighteenth century literary tradition of the revolutionary crowd, this graphic device expanded with the growth of photography and film as political vehicles. Its impact can be traced from modernism to the present through artists such as LászlóMoholy-Nagy, Warhol and Andreas Gursky.

La Folla Oceanica will use archival, open-source and commercial moving-image material to explore the wider social, political and cultural implications of crowd imagery. Engaging the sinister history of fascism and utopia with contemporary digital technology and crowd-theory, the work will attempt to consider the complex, visceral and euphoric condition of the mob.

After graduating from Oxford University and the Royal College of Art with an MFA in Sculpture, Kit Wise received the Wingate Rome Scholarship in Fine Art in 1999, to study at the British School at Rome. In 2001 he received a Boise Travel Scholarship, administered by the Slade School of Fine Art, for subsequent research in New York & Australia. Since moving permanently to Australia in 2002, Wise has received three Australia Council grants in the categories of Presentation & Promotion (as curator), Skills Development (Tokyo Studio Residency) and New Work (Emerging) as well as grants and commissions from Arts Victoria, Arts Tasmania and the Besen Family Foundation. He completed his PhD at Monash University in 2012.

Wise practices as an artist, art writer and curator. He has held 15 solo exhibitions in Australia, America and Italy, exhibited in group exhibitions in Australia, Taiwan, Korea, the UK, France, Germany, Italy, Spain and Holland, and has published numerous articles, reviews, book chapters and catalogue essays including texts for Australian and international art journals such as Frieze, unMagazine and Continuum: Journal of Media and Cultural Studies.

Recent solo exhibitions include Flood, Screen Space, Melbourne (2013); Arcadia, Hyde Park Art Center, Chicago (2012); Disaster, Australian Experimental Art Foundation (2011); Explosion at Sarah Scout, Melbourne (2010), Summertime at ACCA @ Mirka, Australia Centre for Contemporary Art, Tolarno Hotel (2009); Natural Disaster at Linden Centre for Contemporary Art (2008); Rhapsodia at the Centre for Contemporary Photography (2007); Superhappiness at CONICAL (2006) and Soujourner, Westspace (2005).

He is currently Associate Dean (Education) and an Associate Professor in Fine Art in the Faculty of Art & Design, Monash University, Australia; as well as the Bachelor of Fine Arts Honours Course Coordinator. He is represented by Sarah Scout Presents, Melbourne.