General Review of Gain and Loss
A collaborative installation with Daniel von Sturmer and Andy Thomson Westspace, Footscray 1997 |
SELECTED COLLABORATIVE PROJECTS
2006 Synoptic 06 with Natasha Johns-Messenger, Mir 11, Melb, 2005 Formless, commissioned by Experimenta art Inc for Vanishing Point, Melb, 2004 Pointform, with Natasha Johns-Messenger, Conical Gallery, Melb, 1998 Cube, with Andy Thomson and Daniel von Sturmer in Strangely Familiar, curated by Claire Williams, ACCA, Melb, 1997 General Review of Gain and Loss, with Andy Thomson and Daniel von Sturmer, Westspace, Melb 1996 The Art of Listening, with Brenda Ludeman, Nicole Tomlinson and Georgina Konstandakopoulos, Linden Gallery, Melb.
SELECTED SOLO EXHIBITIONS
2006 Apartment, at Apartment, 2002 Several Contingent Provisionalities, Penthouse and Pavement, Melb. Eraserhead, RMIT Project Space, 1998 Untitled, Grey Area Art Space Inc, Melb, In the Light of the Other 1st Floor Artist and Writers Space Melb.,1997 Scan, Studio 12, 200 Gertrude St, Melb, Flux, Stripp Gallery, Melb,1996 In Time 1st Floor Artist and Writers Space, Melb.
SELECTED GROUP EXHIBITIONS
2007 An answer for the parts only itinerant sighs can fathom, curated by Storm Gold, Victoria Park Gallery, Stranger Geography curated by Kit Wise, Palazzo Vaj Prato Italy, 2005 Australian New Media Art, Museum Of Contemporary Art, Skopje, November, Australian Video Art 5uper, Museumsqartier, Vienna, 2004 The Visible and the Invisible commissioned for Swoon, ACCA, Melb, 2003 Video Projekt, Kings Space Gallery, Melbourne, VCA Projects, curated by John Neeson, VCA Gallery , Melbourne, 2002 Gating curated by Michael Graeve, Westspace, Melb, 1998 Lux, Curated by Julian Savage, 1st Floor, Melb, 1997 Flat, curated by Michael Goldsmith, RMIT Project Space, Melbourne, Adjacent, curated by Susie Atiwell, 200 Gertrude St, Melbourne, 1996 Dermartology, curated by Stephen O’Connell, 200 Gertude St, Melb.
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In choosing to produce a single work, these artists are attempting to open their individual practices by way of a working process responsive to the possibilities of exchange, improvisation and cooperation. In the construction of this installation, the spaces between works that may have served to differentiate one practice from another are revealed as a shared consideration of the peripheral, incidental and contingent aspects of reality and its representation.
All three artists are disinclined to work within the silent immobility of modernism's picture plane; the space of painting. This pictorial space is a purely representational space, obedient only to the terms and conditions of vision itself. To stand and behold a painting is to engage with a representation that is perpetually in the present moment. All front and no back, painting's plane provides a bounded, flat and reliable ground on which an image can hold still. Instead these artists choose to perforate, make permeable and mutable a pictorial space by rending it open to the passage of time, of bodies, and a particular kind of attention. Unlike the space of painting, their not-so-pictorial space is inclusive of a duration. It sustains a before, and after and a successiveness that cannot be experienced in the blink of an eye. With no single point from which the entire work can be apprehended, the work is revealed through apertures and interstices that punctuate the blind foil of the works material configuration.
In traversing its spaces, anticipation and expectation of a particular space or situation can contrive to confound and illuminate the experience of the work. By reconfiguring the topographical coordinates of the space, the work attempts to bring to light the necessity for an orientation not solely contingent upon the visual. Illusion and disillusion may occasion a recourse to navigation not by sight, but by sense.
The work encourages a particular kind of attention. A kind of double vision; a seeing and a knowing one is seeing. It provokes a consciousness of self and of attending that sees through to the structures and conditions that frame, focus and give orientation to the experience of looking. It is an attention that engages both mind and body in the negotiation of a work that is not-at-all straightforward.
This both at once- of being caught inside the space of representation and looking on from without- may counter any attempts to delineate the work by its material periphery alone. In this work, outside and inside take on a deductive relation to one another. All at once, here and there, exterior and interior are simultaneously affirmed and confused, situating the viewer in a transitional space that is seemingly no-place in particular.
Though not specific to this particular site, the work has been conceived and produced in response to those conditions that sustain the site as a building reconfigured to accommodate the display and reception of art. While contingent upon the terms and conditions of vision itself, the work has set its sights from that which is already in existence, rendering the person who arrives, who walks in, through and around and out again, as the site and subject of the work.
Tanya Eccleston,
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