Words by Keane Fletcher

Happy Friday Hiplanders! As promised, today we’re premiering the second video in Charlie Wilde’s stark and affecting new video series, ‘Antithesis’. And it's been worth the wait.

Check out the second video, 'For You #3', below. 

Once again, 'For You #3' teams Wilde (and fellow guitarist Lucas Jones) with director Connor Western and performer Keeley Geier as she dances her way through an empty North Perth Town Hall. In fact, the entire 'Antithesis' video series was filmed here over one continuous 12 hour period, allowing each video to flow seamlessly to the next.

That being said, 'For You #3' is remarkably different in tone. Almost immediately we can note the shift in colour scheme. Whereas 'Antithesis' was all burnished browns and intimate sepia, 'For You #3' is cold and blue, indeed almost monochrome in its palette. Geier's movements are different too; where once her choreography was legato and considered, here it becomes jerky and erratic, a maelstrom of jutting elbows and whipping turns as she reckons with this change in mood.

Something is going on here. Something darker and more oppressive. Considering the team behind this piece, this contrast is not accidental. For when viewed back to back, the accumulated meaning of both videos seems to suggest a few things. Namely, that we have multiple states whirling around inside of us; that we can often flip between them at a moment's notice; and how, in the case of those suffering from anxiety and other mental health conditions, these flips can be both uncontrollable and all encompassing. 

Though perhaps - and I'm just speculating - Wilde and the team are reaching for something more philosophical here as well. That, rather than being opposites, perhaps we might consider these states as complementary to one another, that each one exists only in relation to the next. As the great writer Alexandre Dumas once so expertly put it:

'There is neither happiness nor misery in the world; there is only the comparison of one state with another, nothing more. He who has felt the deepest grief is best able to experience supreme happiness.'

In any case, we have one video left to go before the series is over, and I for one can't wait to see how Wilde and the team will finish it out.

Stay tuned for the third and final instalment of Charlie Wilde's 'Antithesis' video series premiering here, next Friday, exclusively on Hipland!