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"... Brophy seems preternaturally able to articulate the nuance of digital animation and cinematic sound. (...) Through this mix-master approach Brophy managed to co-opt or perhaps corrupt an otaku sense of pathos ('I am alone but not lonely') into gender politics, suturing 1960s' musicals with contemporary pornography. Somewhere between Hélène Cixous and the Marquis de Sade, Hans Bellmer and Batman, Brophy posits his visual narratives of contemporary love."Kit Wise, Frieze, London, Issue 113, March 2008
"... Unabashed in its investigation of pop-cultural taboos, the work of Philip Brophy identifies aspects of Western culture that pass unnoticed or are fundamentally ignored by others within his field, perpetuating weird yet significant contemplations of contemporary life."
Jared Davis, UN Magazine, Melbourne, Vol.2 No.1, 2008
Link to complete online PDF review
Kit Wise, Frieze, London, Issue 113, March 2008"Discussing voice in film, Australian artist, filmmaker, curator and cultural theorist Philip Brophy wrote in 1998: 'Our larynx is the morphic machine of that muscular and neurological struggle to attain speech. ... Each and every nuance of our genetic inference, communal interaction and acoustic environment is impressed on our vox mechanica. Vowels are tied to our mother's breath; pitch to our conversation with friends; phrasing to our surrounding architecture; volume to our landscape. ... It is no surprise that we fear the taking-over of our voice by another.' Nearly a decade on, Brophy continues to investigate the significations of voice and film with Vox at Gertrude Contemporary Art Spaces, an audio-visual installation consisting of an animated filmic exchange between a male character and a female character. Their voices, however, are inhuman oscillations with no evidence of a familiar language to be found in the digital noises that erupt from their mouths. Furthermore, as each character speaks, their face expands and mutates in a manner that evokes the horrific bodily expansions made popular in sci-fi and horror films such as Alien and The Fly. Considering past uses of this cinematic device of bodily mutation, the characters of Philip Brophy's Vox are instantaneously associated by viewers with that which is alien or other.
In Vox, the morphing and digitization of voice explores the popular filmic icon of male and female dialogue. The artist investigates the reductive manner by which we extract meaning from a vast array of film and entertainment. As stated in the catalogue essay: 'In West Side Story ... the girls flap their Rican skirts in waves of thigh heat. The spiv studs respond with a series of erectile poses. ... In Vox, a man opens his mouth. Stuff comes out. A woman opens her mouth. Stuff comes out.' It has been noted that the meaning we extract from sound, for example the melancholy of Beethoven's Moonlight Sonata, is not due to innate content ingrained within the physical structure of the music's sound waves, nor is it a biological matter, it is simply the product of a psychological association that is produced upon hearing any given sound. In Vox, with such psychoacoustic implications in mind, Brophy post-dubs the characters of his uncanny romance with digitally synthesized noise. This creates confusion for the audience by denying them the naturalised human voice they expect, through which literal interpretation is confounded. Without a clear understanding of what is being communicated and because of our inability to associate these noises with literal expressions, the audience is confronted with an ambiguity and disorder, one that the images and sounds of popular culture counter through well-known pop songs, television and film. (...)
The human body, too, is of intrinsic importance to an investigation of Philip Brophy's Vox. Vaginal constructs become phallic and labial likenesses are bound within male genitalia, all morphing into unfamiliar bio-structures. This process brings to mind the genital development of an unborn child, where testes ascend or descend to form ovaries or testicles respectively, prior to the assignment of culturally constructed gender distinctions.
Hollywood romantic comedy cinema expands upon Western gender constructs to extreme levels and this is bizarrely reinterpreted in Vox. Brophy's 'romantic comedy' deconstructs filmic iconography, regurgitating select traits in a manner that welcomes the viewer and listener at first into an experience of filmic familiarity, and then proceeds to destroy certainty with a barrage of completely alien sonic information. Unabashed in its investigation of pop-cultural taboos, the work of Philip Brophy identifies aspects of Western culture that pass unnoticed or are fundamentally ignored by others within his field, perpetuating weird yet significant contemplations of contemporary life. . "
Jared Davis, UN Magazine, Melbourne, Vol.2 No.1, 2008
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