These projects are now situated as the artist’s poetic bookends to the Melbourne COVID 19 lockdown laws and for this, along with many other associations, these works relate as parataxis within the same poetic body—a mixtape or visual essay that engages a new range of formal structures in the artist’s work, such as shorter durations, multiple edits, voice-over and subtitling.
Both Keystrikes and Homo Suburbiensis employ traditional filmic devices (often by direct appropriation), in order to investigate strategic and creative misuse of civic space.
Activity that features prominently in the artist’s oeuvre, with the exception of distance running (taken up by Homo Suburbiensis), whereas climbing/buildering and BMX riding (Keystrikes), are engaged again by Gladwell through the lens of various mensura of spatial and temporal restrictions.
The curfewed 5km radius, ‘essential’ only travel conversely created conditions conducive to urban practice, which freely (re)claimed newly emptied civic space.
Key Strikes and Homo Suburbiensis were produced within a dialectal tension between creative, critical and experimental labour against (and within) the operations of the state.