Representing experience : changing audience relationships in contemporary art

By practice and research this exegesis includes the audience in the making of art, by using the responses of others that inhabit the artwork. It also establishes 'not-knowing' as a methodology to examine changing relationships to audience in contemporary visual arts.

Ex Libris - the book in contemporary art: cover image

Catalogue and exhibition essay for Ex Libris. Essay by Lisa Sullivan, curator Geelong Gallery. Catalogue cover image by Patrick Pound, detail from 'From Darkness to Light.

Outlaw-in

For the 2014 McClelland Gallery Sculpture Survey and Award Bozo ink created a scaled down model of The McClelland Gallery. Crash-landed in the Australian bush, the gallery’s belly is exposed, and into it the viewer can poke their head. Continuing our investigation into space, identity and Australian art history we look to the viewer to become panoptic in their view of the gallery and its surrounds, and at the same time the subject under surveillance. We encourage the viewer to cross the threshold from subject to object – to break the sanctity of the object/gallery. Like most of our works the invitations are many, we layer real-time experience with fictional narratives, illusions and copies. As much as we question the integrity of space we ask the viewer to consider their complicity in the history and occupation of it.

Op Shop Series

This series of works by the Melbourne collaborative group, Bozo Ink, in undermines the art gallery’s system of exchange and representation. They make the observation that as a site that supposedly reflects and critiques contemporary cultures, histories and practices, the gallery is merely a space of exhibition. Like many contemporary artists, and the critics and academics who assess their work, they are aware of the inherent paradox of exhibiting a work critical of commodity culture since we enter into a process of consumption that actually magnifies commodity culture when we place work in a gallery context. Bozo Ink’s project, The Op-Shop Series, offers a critique of consumptive practices in the art gallery and looks to entwine art, everyday practices and resistance strategies. They do this to test the potential of the gallery as a site for resistance, and to reconsider its function in the age of “consumption and spectacular exhibition” (Agamben 2007, 82). In linking the counter-practices of profanation (Agamben 2007) with the Situationist strategy of détournement (Debord 1994; Wark 2013) they hope to recast the art object as one without currency in the gallery. They propose that it is possible for the art object to unsettle both the image and the system of exchange within which it operates.

Op-Objects

The work relates to Australian history in that it reconfigures the found objects - furniture, paintings and narratives - to move implicate the viewer in unexpected ways.

Re-photography as critical strategy in recent art

Re-photography describes a set of contemporary art practices which involve the mechanical reproduction and re-presentation of photographic imagery appropriated from a variety of cultural sources. The paper takes as its focus a range of re-photographic activities emanating from New York in the early 1980s in which the author discusses certain issues pivotal to an understanding of the status of contemporary art and its possibilities for critical function.

The evolution and conservation of Taiwan's aboriginal art heritage

This thesis synthesises perspectives from heritage, museum studies, anthropology and contemporary art to provide a dynamic account of the role of art among the Aboriginal peoples of Taiwan. It proposes that the continuing practice of contemporary Aboriginal art in Taiwan is an important instrument for maintaining Aboriginal groups' cultural vitality.

UFO architecture

Acetate photographic prints. Photo installation.