Track and Trials

Track and Trials is a dual-channel video installation commissioned for the exhibition Shaun Gladwell: Stereo Sequences in 2011.

The two-channel installation Track and Trials sets up a relationship between two opposing screens. One features footage of track riding under the Sydney Harbour Bridge (track riding is a fixed, single gear, break-less style of bicycle riding that was developed in the velodrome but made popular by couriers in New York City in the late 1990s). The second features trials bike riding (a competitive off-road, all-terrain practice that also uses fixed gear bicycles) on a rocky ocean foreshore.

Both trials and track riders stall their bicycles, often making themselves completely still. Gladwell is attracted to the contradiction between the potential speed of these bicycles and their capacity for stasis and perfect poise – the push and pull of these opposing forces. The Track screen references Grace Cossington-Smith’s painting The Bridge in Curve (1926), the Sydney Harbour Bridge near completion. Cossington-Smith celebrates not only the construction of the bridge as a triumph of engineering but also Australian modernism. Gladwell replicates Cossington-Smith’s perspective while celebrating the ways in which the riders have reclaimed the space underneath the bridge as a space for creativity, beyond the intended functionality of the space.

Similarly, the Trials screen references Caspar David Friedrich’s romantic painting Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog (1818), in which a man standing on a rocky outcrop looks out onto a stormy ocean. Like Friedrich’s subject, the trials rider is ‘wedged between two time signatures – the slow geological signature of the rocks and the furious swell of the ocean’, as Gladwell describes it. As the rider reaches the top of the rocks he rests, putting his feet to the ground, and takes in the view of the ocean from a vantage point he has worked hard to achieve. Like Friedrich’s wanderer, Gladwell’s rider is insignificant within a landscape while striving for mastery over it.