Escape Velocity: Between the possible and actual

To date, art historical scholarship regarding the practice of Shaun Gladwell has heavily focused on his contributions to (a) the imaginary of Australia's urban and natural landscape, and (b) the choreographic and performative dimensions of his practice. However his recent experiments in AR and VR mark a substantial departure from these thematics, inviting renewed enquiring into his work.This essay explores metaphysical questions that Gladwell's recent AR & VR works open onto, considering the fragmented realities implicit in the integration of these technologies into the museum space, as well as their particular capacity to evoke nascent forces of gravity and levity that have driven the artists work to date.The significance of this catalogue essay committed by the Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney, which accompanies Gladwell's major survey exhibition at this major Australian cultural institution, is found in its critical engagement with Gladwell's practice. It challenges the conventional 'catalogue essay' form by interlacing existent and non-existent works into the contextualisation of Gladwell's experiments with new technologies.