Bicycle Race 1978

Location

Bicycle Race 1978, is a video transferred and edited footage from four Super8 cameras used to document a performance in Adelaide, the capital city of South Australia, in 1978. The work was staged twice, the second time was in Canberra, as part of the performance art festival, ACT 1.

At the core of Bicycle Race is a drawing – of a double helix a twisted ladder structure of deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA), made with forty kilograms of flour, drawn on a bitumen roadway. Francis Crick, James Watson discovered DNA in 1953. Rosalind Franklin, an English chemist and X-ray crystallographer whose image ‘photo 51’2 was critical to realising the double helix form. The transformative discovery of DNA marks the advent of contemporary biology. The image of its elegant but dynamic coil, constantly winding and unwinding, is today found everywhere: in culture, advertising, and art, as much as it is in science. The double-helix drawn in flour demarcated the cyclists path, Bicycle Race explores the tension between structure and chaos, impulse, and abstraction.

Anonymous Entries, Sydenham International 2024
Proyector Festival 17, Madrid, Spain 2024
LOOP Video Festival, Barcelona, Spain 2018
Jarvis Dooney Gallery, Berlin 2017
Accident and Process Perth Institute for Contemporary Art 2015
Derek Kreckler Downstairs, Performance Space, Sydney 1995
Act 1, Canberra School of Art 1978

Collections:
Wollongong Art Gallery
The Art Gallery of Western Australia
The Pushkin Museum, Moscow 2020
Museum of Contemporary Art, Barcelona 2020