The photographer's shadow

The 'Photographer's Shadow' was acquired by the Auckland City Art Gallery (Chartwell Collection)

Experiencing differences and negotiating prejudices at the Immigration Museum Melbourne

The social agency of museums in countering prejudices and fostering respect for differences is increasingly recognised and empirical research has begun to illuminate the impacts of exhibitions devoted to difficult subjects on audiences. This paper draws on an ongoing research project conducted by two Australian universities in collaboration with the Immigration Museum Melbourne aimed at understanding the role of the Identity: Yours, Mine, Ours exhibition in countering racism and increasing the acceptance of differences among Australian high school students. The paper focuses on narrative interviews with students which offer insights into how differences are experienced and prejudices become negotiated through processes of meaning-making and embodied engagements. The empirical evidence indicates that the exhibition moves beyond the orchestration of an abstract tolerance by unsettling the Self and destabilising stereotyped interpretations of the Other. Identity: Yours, Mine, Ours creates a place and space of encounter in which differences are humanised, thus facilitating understandings of broader contexts through individual experiences. At the same time, the research findings suggest that the life worlds of students, their personal backgrounds and schools, are intertwined with their interpretive engagements with the exhibition and need to be considered for museum practices and further research.

NEXUS

The artwork in NEXUS is influenced by the South West Volcanic Plain, in particular the area known as the Stony Rises. The artwork responds to the histories and stories embedded in, and reflected by, the landscape. The artwork in this exhibition has layers of referential elements in order to signify the conjunction of occupation on the land and the nexus of relationships the land has sustained.

Aqua optica - planet x

Planet X is video work which is presented using an original optical projection system which involves a large spherical lens, water and rear projection and various other materials including glass, timber, fabricated steel, etc and which I have called "Aqua Optica". The Planet X is 10 min looping video explores both the historical origins of the discovery of Pluto in 1930 (by astronomer Clyde Tombaugh at the Lowell Observatory) and the recent explorations of Pluto by NASA with the New Horizons space craft which was transmitting new images of Pluto at the time of this exhibition.

Three flying saucers

Three Flying Saucers is wall mounted set of three works which parody the iconic kitsch set of three flying ducks which inhabit the walls of many houses from the 1950’s to today. The project proposes a time in the future where contact with alien intelligent life has been established and we have finally obtained proof that Flying Saucers were real and had been visiting our world for many decades. Now these mysterious celestial forms have been adopted as the new kitsch and adorn the homes of the future.

Sisters

Melinda Capp and her sister Meredith are identical twin. The Sisters installation presented at the Castlemaine state festival is an exploration of the experience and memories of having grown up as a twin and the complexity for both the self as single and self as other/double which underpins and confronts both the physical and psychological sense being a twin. Nature / Nurture: The work is explored as a dichotomy of Nature / Nurture by referencing the domestic context of childhood (which can be interpreted as an exposition of the influence of nurture) and reference to the physical, genetic aspect of being a twin (a reference to Nature). The Installation was located in a bedroom of a 1960’s brick house, now empty, and invites the viewer to enter into a world which pulls between these two forces of nature/nurture, which shape the sense of identity and realization of self for each twin. The bond between twins emerges at the cellular level and continues for the rest of their lives. Despite all emergence of individuality and bloodline thread binds them together forever no matter the distance between them and changes through time In dark wooden wardrobe two dresses, made from fine white tissues paper, hang quietly on each side of the robe with backlighting which floods the room with an ethereal luminance. Placed in the center of a large bare wall, a small image of Melinda and Meredith as young children (a photo transfer also on the ephemeral tissue paper) hangs in isolation. This placement and the surrounding space unites these two young twins together, bound in symmetry like a mirror image in the vast open space of the empty wall, a symbol of the potential for growth and individual identity in a world which surrounds them. On the opposite wall a series of object and artifacts are pressed between sheets of acrylic and backlit as if they were some sorts of scientific samples for detailed inspection. Feathers/hair, handmade paper with embroided (reference to the traditionally feminine arts) text and the words Blood Ties traced out. Each object is placed for analysis and hovers in space at the viewers approximate eye level like a series of clues for the revelation of some deeper insight. Hidden speakers were embedded within the walls of the room and played looped recordings at low level inviting the viewer to listen as a voyeur. A series of whispered schoolyard chants by Melinda and Meredith (identical wording were individually recorded by each sister and then superimposed) and a collage of spoken word, memories and anecdotes from the period of their childhood. Most notably recollections of the Apollo Moon landing. A symbol of the ability of science to transcend and reveal that which lies beyond and within, while at the same time counterpointed by the poetics of childhood songs emerging in unison as two twins reveal their innate unification.

Being, vitruvian

"Being, Vitruvian" is the first of two exhibitions encompassing the visual narrative of Daniela Bertol’s creative research "Form Mind Body Space Time" where practices of "making" intersect practices of "moving". ‘Making movement’ is inspired by geometric configurations which are also archetypical shapes and symbols in several cultures and are deeply embedded in the human psyche.

Technics & touch: body / matter / machine

This exhibition project tested the limits of human and robot proficiencies through a series of experimental scenarios. The project explored methods of producing feedback systems through perception and action cycles. The exhibition consisted of two parallel events: a laboratory space where the artists were 'in-residence', producing drawings in conjunction with the robot; and a procedural drawing exhibition in an adjoining space, where the outcomes of this human/non-human team were exhibited alongside the work of practitioners who have been exploring rule-based drawing for some time. The aim was to make and to discuss approaches to embodied, expanded and autonomous intelligent systems.

Warlpiri drawings : Remembering the future

An exhibition of drawings made by Warlpiri people between 1932 and 2013

Documentary Intersect

I started by collecting things in order to inform my work. What seems to have happened slowly is that the collections eventually became my work. – Patrick Pound The New Zealand-born, Melbourne-based artist Patrick Pound has had a long-term engagement with the work of Walker Evans, both as a writer and as a practicing artist. For his solo exhibition at the Adam Art Gallery, Pound developed an installation comprised of found images, taking his cue from Walker Evans’s practice of working with readymade printed matter which he published in magazines such as Fortune and Architectural Forum. While Pound’s collecting habits are voracious, he is also a great organiser. He is interested in typologies and arranges items according to shared content: ‘tears’, ‘floral clocks’, ‘crime scenes’, ‘sleepers’, and so on. Laying these out in linear sequences Pound discovers points of intersection to create complex grids of structured yet chaotic imagery. A Hollywood film still of a crime scene will sit eerily alongside an image of a real deceased subject sourced from an archive; or a set of postcards will show the same subject, shot by different photographers and describing both changing viewpoints and the passage of time. Pound has stated: ‘People make sense of the world through assembling, listing and categorising…meaning is to be found in the accumulation of [these] details.’

From the inside to the outside. Architecture Venice Biennales 2014 and 2016

The comparison between the Position Statements of the latest two Venice Biennale of Architecture, Fundamentals, directed by Rem Koolhaas in 2014 and Reporting from the front that Alejandro Aravena prepares for 2016, is an evident sign of the internal stress that architectural practice has been suffering during the last decade. Koolhaas intensively focused on the immediate past whilst Aravena presents a Biennalle strongly decided to explore possible alternatives for the future of Architecture. The first one tried to define the core, theessence, the most elemental particles that utterly compose Architecture. The second looks at the boundaries, the periphery, the outskirts, the limits of the discipline. Fundamentals was theoretical, personal, abstract, compact and aesthetic. Reporting from the front will be practical, collective, concrete, permeable and ethical. This fertile antagonism or counterpoint between both approaches is too frequently understood as incompatible. However, as a matter of fact the coexistence of these two different perspectives within architectural practice is the mostdistinctive feature of the complex contemporary architectural landscape. The insertion of the analysis of both position statements within the historical evolution of the Venice Bienale since 1980, allows a reinterpretation of the antagonism between the two exhibitions and evidences some lines of thought and action in the architectural world. Following the war industry terminology that Report from the front has chosen, Aravena identifies with precision the theatre of operations; the space and time that is requesting an urgent response from architecture.Previously Koolhaas had defined the armament that Architecture has available to undertake this crucial mission: to define the role and relevance of Architecture in the immediate future. Until now, battles in the front have been a guerrilla warfare. More reactive than proactive. Battles for survival more than for experience. Necessary but, at the same time, insufficient. Valuable actions in radical contexts; heroic acts in extreme situations; occasional infiltrations that find their final reason for being in their own audacity. Time has come for these counterattackarchitectures to evolve from protests to proposals.

Timbre

Drawing Is/ Not Building showcased three different approaches to architectural drawing, focusing on drawing's material and conceptual terrain across three radically different practices. Seventeen practitioners were asked to contribute, offering contemporary viewpoints on architectural drawing and present these in visual and textual form as a complimentary component of the publication.

Thinking through things: Patrick Pound and the Flinders University art museum collections

Patrick Pound is known for his singular approach to art production: compiling, collecting, combining and captioning things in ways that challenge the orthodoxy of museums and their taxonomies. Working with public holdings and his own esoteric compendia of ‘stuff’, Pound uses self-devised cues to give shape, form and meaning to his exhibits. Pound makes his debut in Adelaide with Flinders University Art Museum, mining the 6,500 works in our care to make unexpected and unprecedented connections