Exhibits,

Sarah Bunting Cenotaph to a Momentary Triumph

Opening: Wednesday 4 April, 6-8pm Dates: 4-21 April 2012

Historically, the monument has acted as a site for the remembrance and celebration of human achievement. Cenotaph to a Momentary Triumph returns to its linguistic origin, monere, which translates as ‘to remind’, or ‘to warn’. Explored via a series of paintings, and sculptural objects that may have emerged from the painted space, within these works the monument perversely stands as a paean to failure: personal, social and political. These peculiar constructions stand abandoned, misunderstood and unlamented by their invisible observers. The ‘failed’ medium of painting becomes enfolded with the anachronism of fallible structures intended to reify events and peoples of the past.

Sarah Bunting is a Melbourne-based artist who is endlessly fascinated by the potential of the painted space. Exploring the painting as the locus of a collapse in time and space, her work explodes the fictional with a highly subjective ‘real’ in order to comment on systems of authority and notions of failure and success, both in a personal and broader political and social sense.