Sam Bloor

A REAR WINDOW PROJECT

Line Drawings (2018) is an ongoing video series by Western Australian artist Sam Bloor. Similar to rules and regulations, lines promote social order and conformity. Bloor disrupts such assumptions by expanding on pre-existing symmetry and shifting human behaviour. Line Drawings detail unauthorised painting gestures as the artists processes are filmed using surveillance-like drone footage. The angle of the camera, eagle-eyed and distant, can only watch on. Similar to CCTV, which is designed to prevent and detect crime, it is rendered helpless without the means of physical intervention. Bloor is interested in the visibility of labour within public spaces including in Boorloo, Western Australia where he grew up and where the series was filmed. In analysing themes of Australian ‘nationhood’ and Westernised immigration ideologies, Bloor employs his practice to question everyday commonalities shared by modern societies. His work regularly includes thought-provoking text that stems from his background as a traditional signwriter, although in Line Drawings, rebellious and freely painted lines replace written script.

Sam Bloor is a visual artist from Perth, Western Australia. His practice explores the poetics of public space and place-making, often employing a site-specific ethos. Bloor graduated with a Bachelor of Fine Arts from Curtin University in 2017. Line Drawings was previously exhibited in Heathcote Select 2018 at Goolugatup Heathcote, WA, and in State of Abstraction at the Art Gallery of Western Australia in 2023/24.

Line Drawings is part of Dunedin Public Art Gallery’s Rear Window Moving Image Programme, which showcases moving image works by contemporary Aotearoa New Zealand and international artists.