EUGENE CARCHESIO
30.1 - 23.2
The Museum of Contemporary Silence is a museum of invention and storage of Carchesio's ideas. It houses a collection of works that haven't yet been made. With an architecture half dream, half reality, it is a metaphysical structure that can only ever exist in the present - as contemporary as silence ever can be.
Liza Asmussen from catalogue essay
|
LYELL BARY
30.1 - 23.2
Every Little Detail the show is called, but what is there to see? There are three titled works with enlargements made of each.... Beyond their allusions to Sherrie Levine and even Matisse, we would call these works Baroque in their fascination with the curve, the fold, the drapery and fabric of things.
Rex Butler from catalogue essay
|
SUSAN NORRIE
27.2 - 23.3
Norrie's work ... moves away from painting and towards the filmic in this work, particularly in her
explicitly photographic palette, referenced specifically in the use of the photographer's retouching kit. In taking her title for shudder from the Antonioni film, Norrie is
commenting ironically on the assumption of some kind of mystical experience
in the painterly act. ...
Helen Grace from catalogue essay
|
ANNE OOMS
27.3 - 20.4
"To feed the last of the seven texts written for The Ladies of Nairn I had on my desk a post card of a painting of the Virgin and Child with a walnut and another of a green Hans Arp sculpture. Their choice at that moment had no apparent reason. Blocked for a bit, I absent mindedly turned over the Arp card and noticed the title, Waldhut and having no German dictionary, rang a friend who looked it up. It means keeper of the forest or you could say game keeper, he told me."
Anne Ooms, 1997 from catalogue essay
|
DEAN WHITEHORN
24.4 - 4.5
Looking back on it, Dean Whitehorn, the VRTT operator, seemed a little hungover at the time, but heÕd had a lot of experience and I trusted him implicitly. When I came to, several minutes later, I found myself in a large white space which I took to be one of the studios at 20th Century Fox. There were some free standing white walls with gaps between them, forming an enclosure in the centre of the studio. Several people were walking in and out of the enclosure on what appeared to be some kind of stepping stones surrounded by water. Every so often there was a bright flash of light.
Suzanne Treister/Rosalind Brodsky from catalogue essay
|
JULIE HENDERSON
8.5 - 18.5
duende, in collaboration with Anne Walton and Caroline Farmer. This mysterious and almost romantic installation consisted of various forms of containment and closure which both closed off and delimited, but at the same time allowed leakan=ges and partial escapes. ... A work where offering and denial are in constant exchange and tension.
|
WARREN VANCE
17.09 - 11.10
living proof//
I am the past,/or genetico-chemical/ boiled up for now/ as person.
// Or, I am some socio-/ ethnographic detail or another/ like, I am Richard/ the born in Geelong, the / poet, say,/ from exotic Western District stock,/ to affable bull-necked bastards,/ and a diamond/ backed, flame bellied, / succubus./ Like that.
...
Richard Garward
from catalogue essay
|
|
| LAYWERS GUNS & MONEY From the Catalogue essay by Richard Grayson: ... Also in the mix were long-standing questions and debates with numerous different people about the ideas of the 'transgressive', the claiming and romanticisation of the criminal in a certain school and reading of art, artists and culture, and the image: much reproduced, used by Bataille in one of his essays, of a drugged prisoner having chunks of flesh pulled from his body with pincers.
|
JOHN REID, ALEX DANKO, ANDREW PERTRUSEVICS, HARRY WEDGE
19.6 - 13.7
Since 1982, John Reid has been making a work made up entirely of Australian banknotes. The project, designed to draw attention to the economic underpinnings of political repression - and in particular political disappearances - resulted in a three year legal battle contesting the fifty two charges laid against him by the police. A central focus in the work of Aleks Danko has been the experiences, narratives and hidden currents of Australian suburbia. Iconic images used in the exploration of these have varied from the garden shed to Australian Rules football and Vegemite. Andrew PetrusevicsÕ work has evinced an ongoing fascination with the structures and expressions of power. The work of Harry J Wedge powerfully articulate the various forces and influences brought to bear on the individuals and peoples of Aboriginal Australia.
|
SALLY MANNELL, SCOTT REDFORD, DESTINY DEACON
17.7 - 10.8
Sally Mannell's work uses the 'witness request boards' to be found on the streets of London - where she was recently resident. Redford's work references many different codings and languages: from those of advertising, fine art practice, popular culture and gay iconography in works that help blur the boundaries between these seemingly discrete areas. Deacon explores positionings and representations within contemporary Australia from a Koori perspective. She uses objects and photographs in ways that are both playful and deeply critical of the representations and (ab)uses of indigenous cultures within history and current media.
|
REBECCA CUMMINS, PATRICIA PICINNINI, LAURENS TAN, MIKE STEVENSON
14.8 - 7.9
Rebecca Cummin's focus is on technology, and the way that technologies can be used to change, and control understandings. This work articulates the "terrifying poetry of euphemism" generated by Gulf War rhetoric. Piccinini's work has centred on digitisation, the human genome project and on ideas of societal construction. This recent body of work looks at the implications of artificial tissue growth and the ÔownershipsÕ of biology. Tan's work recently has focused on the approaches and hardwares of gambling (an increasing obsession in Australia) as a central metaphor, where the individual is positioned in a web of various demands and laws: the wish to gain money for 'free', the inevitable fact that it is the casino/pokie owner that the odds favour, and the pitching of the individual against the laws of chance and luck. Stevenson uses as a starting point those trolleys that street preachers and conspiracists use to present and carry their texts and messages.
|
CRAIG WALSH
14.8 - 7.9
Walsh looks at ideas of promotion (though representation and window display), production and exhibition in a work that used freight cases, documentation and video
|
CRAIG ANDRAE
11.9 - 5.10
This show was informed by a trip to Europe by the artist during which he checked out some of the productions of visual arts practice usually considered 'great'. In a way the genesis of the exhibition can be seen to echo the 18thc liberal tradition of the Grand Tour. Andre used a number of works by European and American artists as a basis for some of the works.
|
ALAN CRUICKSHANK
9.10 - 2.11
The exhibition is a continuation of a project that Cruickshank has been engaged in from the Arcanum Museum
|
JAN NELSON
6.11 - 30.11
Jan Nelson knows a lot about the slippery yet intensely valuable properties of transcendence. Her recent work has explored the processes and power structures by which art somehow exceeds its material properties to become charismatic.... In Studio Practice the artist dismisses the heroic in order to find something real in the everyday. The video and photographic images of walking, leaping, crawling and lying down illustrate activities that are at once menial yet also full of creative potential.
David Cross from catalogue essay
|
RICK MARTIN
4.12.97 - 18.1.98
It would be as if we had seen something for the first time, without memory and without recollection, without the phantom of the elsewhere seen, an already seen, as if, impossibly, seeing itself was, at once, seen, a paradoxical condition of blindness restored, restocked as if momentarily depleted, and all of this would be a reaffirmation in and of ghosts, spectral works, but also the work of archives.
MARK JACKSON from catalogue essay
|
