In June, Adelaide Festival Centre's Moving Image Program is exhibiting The Jellyball Effect by Ariel Ruby on our King William Road digital screens.
Ariel Ruby, The Jellyball Effect, 2023, moving image, 7.50 mins
‘The Jellyball Effect was produced in Taiwan in 2023 while undertaking a 3-month residency at Soulangh Cultural Park Tainan, Taiwan.
The complex colonial history of Taiwan, combined with periods of rapid growth and political change have resulted in a unique landscape that is a true melting pot of cultures and customs, with a renewed interest in indigenous history, culture, and traditions.
While exploring the island, I became intrigued by the ritual and customs of Temple Culture, and the flexibility with which different beliefs were absorbed and respected by one another. I began to look closely at objects that act as symbols and containers for meaning and memory, drawing similarities to the stories of traditional practices in southern Italy as told to me by my Nonna.
The Jellyball Effect explores the idea of a cultural snowball as an expanding heterogenous blob. As it rolls it consumes things in its path, building upon itself to change shape and gain momentum. It doesn’t judge or differentiate; it accumulates. The Jellyball Effect brings a collection of these objects and symbols together in a series of experimental videos all captured in real-time in the studio, taking inspiration from a wide-reaching view of storytelling, folk religion, ritual, and tradition as they become enmeshed with the contemporary world.’ - Ariel Ruby
Ariel Ruby (born Hobart 1993) is an artist with deep connections to the places she has called home, and those that she can imagine. She makes lively, moving worlds filled with glittering items and images that explode with narrative and rich emotional memory. Ruby grapples with the state of our world by seeking to find sensuous experiences in all things, not favouring, yet not disregarding the man-made materials that have become the ‘nature’ of our time.