EXHIBITION DATES:Saturday, 8 August 2009 - Sunday, 20 September 2009
OPENING:6-8pm Friday 7 August
Curators: Reuben Keehan (NSW) Melissa Keys (AUS/USA) Peter McKay (SA)
Artists: Akira Akira (SA) Catherine Bell (VIC) Chris Bond (VIC) Matthew Hunt (WA) Huseyin Sami (NSW)
"3 curators, the same 5 artists, 3 different exhibitions. As Linden uber-curator Jan Duffy says, it's like the 'invention challenge' on Masterchef. Provided with limited ingredients, each curator must compose separate exhibitions for the audience to compare and (inevitably) evaluate in terms of creation or invention. For Jan, the point is to 'make visible' the 'process of cultural production', to expose some of the behind the scenes kitchen prep that produce exhibitions, to manifest the 'persuasion' and 'negotiation' that differentiate exhibition outcomes." - Stuart Koop from Persuasion Equation catalogue essay.
For Melissa Keys exhibition Coming undone the world can be "characterised as being in a state of coming undone. A state of barely together almost falling apartness. The very architecture of our existence is unknowably complex and inherently unsound. We individually and collectively bind it together - but only just. Our environment and lives are at once rich with possibility and riddled with risk. Always in the making and being unmade - incrementally or catastrophically - the world we create and occupy embodies a flux of incompleteness and change."
Reuben Keehan presented the artists with the following statement "Invariably, codes of ethics of official societies of clinical hypnotists forbid the use of hypnosis for entertainment purposes." His exhibition The Ethics of Hypnosis is "a project predicated on failure. Failure is both its point of departure and its point of arrival. Failure is its programmatic goal, its hedging of its own bets; it can only succeed in failing, or fail to fail, so that any success despite itself will be a double failure. It is its own tautological proposition, and in this sense it need not even take place, not even perform."
Peter McKay's exhibition Nature 2.0 deals with the environment. "Though the term Anthropocene is relatively new, we have been imagining this future for some time in science fiction (think classics like Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? Logan's Run and the 'Apocalyptic' and 'Dying Earth' subgenres generally) and acting against it through countless environmental movements. Now that the planet's changes are clearly perceivable and we start to glimpse the impending social, political, and cultural changes ahead, our imaginations begin to shift focus from what might be to dealing with what is. Updating Nietzsche's The Gay Science we might well remark 'Nature is dead. Nature remains dead. And we have killed it. How shall we comfort ourselves?"
Catalogue PDF 802KB
