Decorating Loos explores the aesthetic impulse through the prism of one of its most basic forms - the desire to embellish the lavatory walls with the mark of our distracted fancy. It does this quite literally through the construction of 15 toilet cubicles in the gallery, each of which has been given to an artist to "decorate" according to their creative practice.
The result is 15 immersive environments, each drawing on different mediums, genres, and subject matter - from video and performance to installation, painting and drawing - each a discrete world of imaginary practice, and all existing in intense proximity to one another.
Decorating Loos is intended to interrogate the value of aesthetic endeavor by superimposing advanced contemporary art practice onto the much-denigrated act of public toilet vandalism, asking what is the relationship between these two activities? Are they so different, and if so how?
At the heart of this enquiry is a wry reference to the Modernist architect Adolph Loos, who equated decoration with barbarity and the progress of culture with the gradual eradication of the ornamental from cultural production. He wrote stridently against the decorative urge. He considered it to be a primitive cultural practice that modernity strove to overcome in its progress towards a rational, efficient, and orderly society adorned only with the clean lines of function and the smooth planes of reason.
At stake is the sense of authenticity, of the capacity of art to carry the unadorned truth of its subject, to give us some access to it's reality, free from the signs of an explicit intention to influence or seduce us in it's apprehension. Decorating Loos makes no attempt to resolve the tension between the artistic and the decorative, but only to stage it's conflict and ask what it might mean in an era that is no longer the high modernity of Loos, but is also no longer the post-modernity that attempted to supersede it.
If, as Loos claimed, “One can measure the culture of a country by the degree to which its lavatory walls are daubed”, then with Decorating Loos there is no better means of testing it.
The first week of the exhibition features artists making and installing their work, followed by a mid-exhibition launch night on Thursday June 10th from 6:00 - 9:00 PM.
List of Artists:
Adrian Gebers, Alex Pye, Alex Wisser, Audrey Newton, Crystal Skolnick, Emma Anderson, Francesca Mataraga, Georgie Pollard, Goran Tomic, Huw Lewis, Kate Mackay, Laura Gamio, Mamadada, Pineapple Park, Sarah Breen Lovett, Susannah Williams, Todd McCoy, Victoria Waghorn.
Living Space
12-28 March 2010
Curated by Tom Isaacs
Under the ATVP Emerging Curator Mentorship Program
List of Artists:
Sach Catts, Adrian Clement, Victoria Hampstead,
Tom Isaacs, Tom Loveday, Elizabeth McCrystal, Brendan Penzer, Juilee
Pryor, Julia Rochford, Ebony Secombe, Kurt Sorensen, Grant Stewart,
Goran Tomic, Marguerite Walsh, Alex Wisser.
Living Space,
curated by emerging artist and curator Tom Isaacs, focuses on the
body's relationship to space. The exhibition brings together a diverse
group of artists and artworks including performative works in video,
photography and interactive media.
The physical body and bodily
existence features as the key theme of
Living Space. The exhibition
explores the reciprocal relationship between the body and space, and
the process through which one is defined in the defining of the other.
What
the body is, what it can and cannot do, and the meaning or consequence
of these potentials is a direct corollary of the space in which one
exists and navigates amongst others.
Space, defined as place,
is qualified and given meaning and measure by bodily experiences that
inhabit and activate it, the stories they play out within the
potentials it opens and the limits it sets, both physical and absolute
or conventional and relative.
Through a range of strategies
that play with, pervert or otherwise challenge what we assume we know
Living Space brings together video, multimedia, digital media,
installation, photographic, painting and performance artworks that open
up and divulge the interplay of the borders between body and space.
Special
Musical Performance at the
Living Space launch by self proclaimed
post-hip-hop artist Christian Punch.
See and hear more at: http://www.reverbnation.com/#/christianpunch
Previous Emerging Curator - Hayley Hill Tip of The Iceberg
2-18 October Opening launch Friday 2nd October 6-9pm
The Tip of the Iceberg accesses the depths of the human psyche,
through the body, memory and environment. The exhibition brings
together artworks that construct a language with which to speak about
this enigmatic phenomenon; a language of visual metaphor. The Tip of
the Iceberg creates a dialogue where meaning overlaps and is altered
collectively.
Using the metaphor of Freud’s Iceberg, the human
mind, separated into three levels, is represented by; The tip of the
iceberg (10%) - the conscious level of thoughts and perceptions; Below
the surface of the water - the preconscious or ego level, where
memories and stored knowledge are submerged; Id, the third level - the
roots of the iceberg, the deep unconscious, holding urges, fears,
desires and memories of traumatic experience. According to Freud, every
person has unfathomable depths hidden from view.
In this
exhibition, seven emerging artists - recently graduated and soon-to
graduate students, out of the Sydney College of the Arts Bachelor of
Fine Arts (Photomedia) program - use the theme to look past the tip of
the iceberg to explore deeper waters. The artists’ works cross over the
under-water terrain of subjectivity and memory, childhood, trauma and
the mysterious workings of the body.
Emma Louise White’s Virus
prints, dark areola centres shrouded by glowing light, lifting and
rustling in the breeze, seemingly multiply in the grid formation of the
installation. The imagery brings to life the cells of an un-diagnosable
disease – an alien entity within a body - and the dysfunctional
processes operating below the surface.
Marguerite Walsh’s The
Menstrual Cycle - through drawing, photography, video and sculpture -
suggests a dysfunctional relationship between bodily cycle, emotional
experience and memory, the artist creates a space where biology is
susceptible to chance and order disintegrates into chaos
In The
Dialect of Internal and External, Carly Bertuccio looks through the
nostalgic lens of the home video, re-contextualising the original
footage to create a stimulating slippage between internal memory and
external space, documentation and subjectivity. Home videos are
projected back into the domestic home, with images distorted against
the uneven surfaces of kitchen and hallway.
Water and the
experience of being wet is a recurring theme in 49 minutes and 30
seconds, a photographic series of self portraits by Luke Nguyen.
Composed of sumptuous uncomfortable scenes that play between the
unusual and the banal, Nguyen investigates the autonomous life of
memories in the body, triggered by sensory experience.
Jessica
Fitzpatrick’s Levels inquires into the relationship between a person
and their environment - a black and white photographic series of grainy
portraits, with a creative use of mirrors, revealing the external world
reflecting the inner world.
Cassandra Adams' Blazing Apparition
shines a light on the shadowy nature of reality and its perception,
taking the viewer on a journey where dreams and waking life overlap.
Ambiguous images of domestic life leak into a dream world, where the
unconscious is infiltrating conscious reality.
Bahareh Ganjali's
video, Delusion, provokes the bodily response of vertigo. A doubled
image of a cliff dropping off into a swell of sea undermines the
solidity of the ground beneath one's feet, drawing attention to tricks
of perception between sight, mind and body.
Seen through the
framework of Freud’s iceberg metaphor, The Tip of the Iceberg brings
the id to the surface where the slippery qualities of the human
unconscious are expressed over a spectrum of visual language. The
exhibition is a stimulating exploration of the mysteriously indefinable.
21 August - 6 September 2009
Fresh: Contemporary Baskets and Basketry
Curated by Peter Williamson (Under the ATVP Emerging Curator Mentorship Program)
FRESH: 26 artists hatch up an explosion of colour, form and texture in
an exhibition drawing on the diverse techniques and styles seen in
contemporary basketry.
Curated by Sydney artist, Peter
Williamson - a leading exponent in basketry in Sydney today - FRESH is
more than simply a collection of vessels or containers, the exhibition
features work across the spectrum from the conceptual to the purely
functional, the ornamental to the political and spanning scales from
miniatures to monsters.
From the delicate and intricate to the
rough and coarse, these artworks demonstrate the variety of shapes and
colours that emerge from the repetitive, almost ritualistic, methods of
weaving, binding, stitching and moulding which have been in continual
use since the time of the Pharaohs. The artists have built up their
works from the seemingly molecular to the finished product.
Ranging
from across NSW (Sydney and Regional), FRESH brings together rural and
urban based artists, including an indigenous artists collective from
the South Coast.
As well as many new works, Fresh features a
selection of artists from Tradition and Beyond, a national survey
exhibition curated by Virginia Kaiser for Broken Hill Regional Gallery,
providing Sydney audiences the opportunity to experience the work by
basketry artists of national significance.
By bringing these
pieces together FRESH re-contextualises and assembles a diversity of
methods and techniques that are translated into an overarching survey
of contemporary basketry and art making utilising basketry techniques,
ancient and new, travelling the path from the Pyramids to the Ipod.
Featured artists: Amanda
Hills, Anne Aitkens, Anne Miller, April Erzetich, Bonny Brennan-Foley,
Chris Hutch, Craig Cruise, Danielle Butters, Debbie Callaghan, Diablo
Mode, Flora Friedman, Glenese Keavney, Jason Bell, Karen Patterson,
Kristine Stewart, Lidi Stroud, Linda Elliot, Mabel Dungay, Mark
Simpson, Merri Peach, Peter Williamson, Phyliss Stewart, Sarah Evans,
Steve Russell, Steven Vella, Su-ellen O'Brien
PLUS: Special Opening Night Performance by singer-songwriter Clare Arnold.
Clare
Arnold is an emerging singer-songwriter whose eclectic-folk-mix is
delivered with honesty. With influences ranging from Hissy Higgins to
John Mayer, Arnold's set will feature songs from her recently recorded
EP 'All of Me'.
AND: Coiled Basketry Workshop: with FRESH curator Peter Williamson Saturday 29 August 11am - 2pm COST: $40 All materials provided Minimum age: 10 years
Learn
to make a coiled basket from readily available plant fibres in just a
short time. This time honoured technique is similar to coiling with
clay, but by using simple stitches and a deft hand, a functional and
decorative basket can be produced at the end of the lesson. Maximum number of participants limited to EIGHT.
Previous ATVP-ECMP
Sculpting (with) the
Air
Curated
by Lisa H. Lee
(Under the
ATVP Emerging Curator Mentorship Program)
Tully Arnot
| Francois Breuillaud | Thomas C. Chung | Julian Day, Rachel
Freeman & Sarah Kaur |
Charles Dennington | Amanda Hills | Junn-Daniel
Reforma | Rachel Ellison |
