EO GILL

Conversion
Double-channel video, 2023
Exhibited at Firstdraft Gallery NSW 2023

Conversion uses Hollywood melodrama, porn and “reality” or “documentary” styles and stereotypes to draw on the inherently erotic, persuasive, and seductive nature of cinema and its capacity for conversion. This work traces the conversion prefix “con” to its Latin origins, meaning to trick or deceive, and tethers it to a Freudian theory of conversion as the process by which an unspeakable desire transforms into a speakable one. Freudian conversion resonates with ideas around sexuality and the fetish, or a particular kind of substitution where one thing stands in for something else that is lacking. 

On a broader level, the work speaks to promises of change and transformation but also what it means to be stuck in transition. The work draws on methodologies that expose the production of gender, preventing the possibility of a coherent, singular or fixed identity.

Dialogue is stolen from a multitude of conversion texts from a variety of genres, including Eve Sedgewick’s A Dialogue on Love, the 1990 action film Days of Thunder, therapeutic conversations between Tony Soprano and Dr. Melfi in ‘The Sopranos’, and gay ‘physical exam’ net-porn.

Collaborators
Doctor - played by Brian Fuata
Mother - played by Julia Hyde
John - played by Neil Beedie
Cinematography - EO Gill, Jen Atherton
Additional Camera Work - André Shannon
Set Design & Costume - Micha Couell
Sound Design - Alexander Powers
Lighting Design - Mark Mailler
Editors - EO Gill, Garden Reflexxx
Makeup & Hair - Anastasia Zaravinos
Production Assistants - Jade Muratore, Katie Winten
Set Build Support - Celeste Stein
Graphics - Charlie Cummings

Funding Support
Create NSW

Special Thanks
Mark Mitchell
Sidney McMahon
Nat Randall
Anna Breckon