Engages,

Ross Coulter Audience

Opening: Sunday 22 February, 10:30am Dates: 22 February 2015

Having secured funding to publish a book, local artist Ross Coulter is in the process of shooting every gallery in Melbourne. Coulter will be taking photographs of Bus Projects (blank walled) and it’s audience THIS SUNDAY MORNING at 10:30am and we would like to invite you to participate. If you are interested, please be at the gallery at 10:25am. The shoot will conclude by 11am sharp.

The project “Audience” photographically documents an audience who is gathered in a gallery space and has been instructed to imagine that they are viewing a performance art event. Participants are required to stand or sit in an empty gallery, in which there is no art, while black and white photographs are taken of them.

By drawing on the visual language of 1970s performance art documentation images, Coulter is seeking to construct a photographic archive of an audience witnessing a number of performance events in and around Melbourne. In this series of black and white photographic prints however, the performer and performance are absent, cropped out of the picture. The focus of the images is both the audience, looking on with a variety of expressions as they bear witness to a non-event, and the identity of the gallery space itself. As Australian artist and art historian Charles Green notes that, “through documentation (of performance art happenings or events), the exemplary ‘truthfulness’ of performance deteriorates.