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Cusp - unconscious narratives of the surgical intervention
CUSP Cusp materializes this void in memory by casting the empty space in packaging that once held surgical implements and medical devices used in the operating theatre. “The range of surgical stories re-presented is substantial” says Shiels, “ranging from a breast implant to a prostate biopsy, a cataract correction to a key hole reconstruction on a knee. “Some of the cast objects look like alien weapons or contraptions from sci-fi movies” says artist Julie Shiels. “Others resemble probes used to pierce and penetrate the body in a gothic chamber of horrors.” Shiels has long made art from the empty spaces in plastic packaging and says the tantalizing thing about her work is that the original implements remain mysterious: “In many cases the objects I create bear little resemblance to the surgical technology once contained in the packaging. We don’t know what happens when we are under the knife but we imagine that experience before and after the event and our imaginations sometimes get things way out of proportion” The installation at Project Space will presents some of these subterranean imaginings. Prior to surgery fears are like shape-changing monsters in the night – filling the windows and walls and creeping across the floor. When we go under the knife we surrender ourselves to the secret codes of medicine and the language of its technology, body like and cellular. Finally we are left with hard nuggets of frozen experience archaeology of plaster objects - some broken and some in tact. Cusp examines the surgical intervention, the aesthetics of the anesthetic. Will future archaeologists sift through our ruins and exclaim at our barbarity? Or will they marvel at our ingenuity in managing the suffering of illness and disease in our time? Photo credit: Images 1,2,4,6,10 - Christian Capurro Cusp Launched by Jason Smith - CEO and Director, Heidi Museum of Modern Art SUB12 1 Market Street Gallery opening hours Rubbish Theory at Platform
Photos:John Brash Exhibition Dates: Monday August 30 – Saturday 26 September The 12 windows in Campbell Arcade have been packed with a collection of objects that have been cast from the empty spaces in plastic packaging after the original object has been removed. These multiple forms have been coated in luminescent fibre (flock) and attached directly into the spaces. Each display window has a different pattern: patterns of use that reference products that could have been sold in the now defunct department store: computer gear, toys, confection, etc. Other arrangements, mostly crowded, suggest movement and echo the way people pass through the arcade. Apart from being a mad critique of mass production and the era of the $2 dollar shop this work explores the ideas of material culture and asks questions about what objects will survive and become meaningful beyond their looming use by date. How do changing tastes affect the meaning and value of an object? How will this stuff be viewed in twenty years time? Will we laugh about the old technologies and the crap that filled our lives or will some of these objects have a new meanings and significance? The same question could be asked about this artwork. Small packages
Sophie Gannon Gallery Flock at Ararat Regional Gallery
Landing (400 x 250 cms) and Masked (400 x 200cms) - plaster and flock
Amoeba swatch 2008 (70 x 35cms)
Ararat Regional Art Gallery invites you to the opening of Sleeper
Sleeping with Knives - 2007 - 09
Sleeping with Knives 2007 - 09 (detail)
Bedtime stories 1 + 2 - 2009
Monash Gallery of Art Sleeper, Julie Shiels’ new exhibition at Monash Gallery of Art is the culmination of a four-year project in which she has used discarded mattresses found on the streets of Melbourne as source material for her art. The mattresses are used in a range of ways. Shiels fashions pyjamas from the upholstery, documents the array of weapons found secreted in the stuffing and in the series Bedtime stories binds their ornate fabrics into artist’s books. In his catalogue essay Jason Smith, Director of Heide Museum of Modern Art states ‘ Sleeper reminds us why artists undertake the mysterious, compulsive acts they do to externalise their visions and contemplations of the world we inhabit: they tell us it is necessary to look again, to not deny some of the terrors of the everyday, and to see strange beauty and seek solace in some simple (and not so simple) things. Gallery photos:Katie Tremschnig Inaurgral St Michael’s Archangel Prize
1st prize: Frieze Fragment 1 - 150 x 100cms - plaster, felt and paper The inaugural Archangel Prize is an acquisitive award of $5,000, which is conducted by St Michael’s Grammar School. Patron: Dame Elizabeth Murdoch Yering Station Sculpture Prize 2008
Kitchen Table: 150 x 90 x 80cms champagne wire (muselet, silver solder and felt) Yering Station Sculpture Prize 2008: Highly Commended Kitchen Table is about celebration, consumption and memory. Made from hundreds of flattened champagne wires (muselet) these baskets are fused together from moments in time. Each champagne wire is a distinct form, an individual hieroglyph that holds a memory of a particular celebration. But constructed into bags their origins become blurred. Arranged like shopping on a table, these luminous colours bags hold the form of an invisible content, frozen in time. Judges: Jason Smith, Kelly Gelatly and Vince Alessi Winifred and Wilfred Bowness Contemporary Photography Prize
‘Little Collins Street’ - Finalist Flock@fortyfivedownstairs
Flock They flock together – patterns across the wall: a collection of objects cast from the empty spaces left behind in plastic packaging. Sourced from the tool box, the toy box and the domestic environment, the original moulds are the wallpaper of our daily lives – ever present but barely noticed. Exhibition Opens Wednesday 23 July 2008, 5 - 7pm to be opened by Julian Birnside Redeeming the Ruin
Redeeming the Ruin - The Art of Consumption -Touring Exhibition Jan 2008 - Feb 2009 Our ecological footprint is influenced by the resources we consume and the waste we produce. In western societies, at the heart of this is the commodity. Decorative or functional the commodity is the site of desires and longings. But it is seldom for its intrinsic use value that the commodity is coveted, rather for what it signifies: power, wealth, prestige, success and herein lies its obsolescence. The fashionable artefact is quickly transformed into the old, the despised, the cast-off. Dumped or discarded redundant commodities form the detritus of urban existence. Redeeming the Ruin - The Art of Consumption exhibition brings together the work of 11 artists from around Australia. Each artist has salvaged consumer waste to consider the elements that underlie consumption behaviour. Employing whimsy, humour and subversion the artists question the role of desire, the influence of the corporate world, the nature of gift giving, the idea of knowledge as a commodity and depletion of natural resources. In this, the International Year of Planet Earth, we owe it to ourselves and future generations to rethink our consumption habits, otherwise the slogan ‘buy now, pay later’ may have dire consequences. Latrobe Regional Gallery Shepparton Art Gallery Mornington Peninsula Regional Gallery Banyule Arts Space Swan Hill Regional Art Gallery Artists: Katrina Carter, Laila Maria Costa, Graham Hay, Glenys Hodgeman, Simon Horsburgh, Pamela Kouwenhoven, Giuseppe Romeo, Vin Ryan, Mona Ryder, Julie Shiels, Paul Wood Photo:John Brash |
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