Erin Coates
 
Erin Coates is a Perth-based artist who holds a Master of Fine Arts from the University of British Columbia, Canada. Her short films appropriate techniques and tropes used in B-grade science fiction and horror films to play out absurdist or impossible scenarios. Her work is underscored by an interest in the relationship between the body and the built environment, and a phenomenological analysis of automobile and urban space.
 
 
Erin Coates
‘The Last Climber Alive Must Keep Herself Fit And Ready’
2014. Video, sound, 5:41 minutes.
Sound design: Stuart James.

Erin Coates’ video practice has long been concerned with sci-fi literature, cinema and post-apocalyptic landscapes. The Last Climber Alive Must Keep Herself Fit and Ready is set amid a desolate megalopolis, within which roams a lone female athlete on infinite loop. We watch her stretch, train, accrue muscle and strength in preparation for a battle with an unknown assailant who may never arrive to test the power of this lean and agile urban warrior. The set is the largest architectural model in the world: a miniature replica of a 1:1750 scale of the city of Beijing, housed in the Beijing Urban Planning Museum in China.
– Leigh Robb, Kinesphere publication, 2014