There’s a large screen full of wheat country skies, with lumbering clouds, golden as hay bales. On another screen, bells and ribbons bedeck a rangy peach tree, blowing in the breeze. Cut to a , broadcasting unperturbed amid gravel and the twisted metal of a trash heap. Elsewhere, there’s (Grandma) lying on a bed, her face covered in flowers. that make them look like coloured, diaphanous jellyfish. while Mum and Dad shuffle their feet in a Greek dance that seems to mimic the chickens (or is it the other way around?). A field of chew thoughtfully, sniffing the breeze suspiciously. One has a red tag in their ear, like a rose, and a nose shaped like a heart.
Tina’s multispecies filmography is continually remixed, so that every viewer witnesses a unique ensemble of these snatches of rural life, both choreographed and quotidian. Each scene is extracted from her exquisite films to be reshuffled, like a deck of cards, manifesting a new reality, a new artwork, for every viewer. Every sequence becomes part of a taxonomy which is fed to a hungry algorithm; animals, humans, even the abiotic, are categorised and then randomly re-entangled. Tina calls this databank the ‘,’ a fortunate pun, since ‘King of the Cowboys’ Roy Rogers named his horse Trigger, and given how many horses feature across multiple screens. Indeed, a field full of ‘Triggers’ are frequently encountered within this filmic forest, even horses watching horses on their own movie screen. Is this some kind of Wild West dream, a bucolic soap opera? Yes, but more-than this, Tina has invented her own working class, earth-centred methodology. Agripoet(h)ics is an ethico-aesthetic mode of living, working and playing with the people who labour on the land to keep us all fed and clothed.
Agripoet(h)ics doesn’t mean vaunting the colonial incursion, environmental degradation and monoculture that often goes hand-in-hand with agribusiness. But neither does it demonise those whose lives and economies are caught up in the industrial-agricultural complex. Agripoet(h)ics is a practice of radical kinship that extends well beyond the gallery and into the terrain, as Tina puts it, of more-than art. Tina doesn’t just ‘celebrate’ the multispecies assemblages of farms and small towns, she weirds them via a process she calls ‘Peasant Surrealism’, in which the everyday is bequeathed a strange, otherworldly power; a covered in a curly woollen costume, becoming a reanimated mammoth; filled with jewels and strings of beads instead of viscera. And here, in the gallery space, the screens themselves have become strangely hybrid, with legs and hooves, some of which are made with salt, lest you have the urge to lick as well as look.
There’s another way in which Tina’s work is a human-equine equaliser. The which operates the remix algorithm for the filmic sequences is buried in the viewers’ seat. It’s your ass (hee-haw) that’s the editor! And in this forest of signs, which is also a field of triggers, all possible meanings and combinations are valid. This is (r)evolutionary — art as the great churning machine, reminiscent of Sergei Eisenstein’s filmic sequence of a butter machine that whipped cream while onlooking peasants were whipped into an almost orgasmic frenzy by his frenetic montage technique. Perhaps we could consider Tina’s churning process as a kind of inter-species-square-dance? Do-si-do and who knows what you will be hybridised with, a horse, a cactus, or a mime artist? This algorithmic exquisite corpse makes us all image, screen, viewer, bench, ass and computer program, more-than the sum of our parts.
What I’ve written so far evidences my own ocular-centrism, as I rattle off visual sequences like strings of pearls from a rabbit’s gut — but meanwhile, what am I hearing? Whispers, hums, and liturgies — captions not spoken but chanted as if they were magical spells, singing horses and dancers and even Yiayia into being. To chant is to enchant, to cast a spell, and as I watch and listen I feel I’m part of a magical incantation that’s being woven out of strands of life. Channelling horse power and flower power — but also, hoarse power (when the vocals become raspy, or gruff, or sighing), and, dare I say it, flour power — restoring majesty to the golden wheat country we rely upon but know so little about.
The voices filling the room are like sonic stained-glass windows: fragile, soaring, their impossibly beautiful fragments stab at my heart, demanding I pay attention to the overlooked, the undersung. In this heightened state, not only is every moment cherished and bejewelled, it’s also connected to an infinite web of other crystalline moments, a network of banal and spectacular beauty. It’s all so complex and overwhelming but I have a feeling that there’s a simpler way of describing what Tina does: it might also be called love.