Seeing and Believing May Both be Wrong (one of you, here with you) GOMA Q: Contemporary Queensland Art Gallery of Modern Art level 1 installation view
Seeing and Believing May Both be Wrong (one of you, here with you) GOMA Q: Contemporary Queensland Art, Gallery of Modern Art QLD, installation David M Thomas with Suzanne Howard and Joseph Breikers
Seeing and Believing May Both be Wrong (one of you, here with you) GOMA Q: Contemporary Queensland Art Gallery of Modern Art, level 1, installation view
Seeing and Believing May Both be Wrong (one of you, here with you)
GOMA Q: Contemporary Queensland Art Gallery of Modern Art, level 1, installation view

Video production, Suzanne Howard, Joseph Breikers, David M Thomas and Ben Wicks
Music by Weekend Immendorff

Seeing and Believing May Both be Wrong (one of you, here with you) creates a self contained televisual studio within the Gallery of Modern Art (QLD). Within this space, we have created intimate discursive engagements with audience/ collaborators that explore the changing role and importance of work: how people relate to their jobs, how they work, why they work and their feelings to do with freedom anxiety and happiness.

The work not only contemplates the changing nature of work but also confronts expectations we have of art objects in contemporary art museums. Especially the expectation that art should speak to us about something we care about, that the eyes should follows us around the room, that sculpture should stand on its own two feet. Breikers and I were having fun with the formal qualities of these expectations whilst taking the process of engagement and the idea of work very seriously. The tension between these two ideas and moods are interesting aspects of the final work.

Over the the 90 days of the exhibition at GOMA we conducted 8 interviews that were incorporated into three different presentations of the work. Two additional small monitor video montage works were produced, these were video collages of behind the scene footage and video feedback intended as a metaphor for our contemporary experience of electronic self consciousness. Two electronic musical scores were produced by myself and Suzanne Howard (Weekend Immendorff) these served as the ambient soundtrack for both the video sequences and sculpture/installation works.