Exhibits,
Ponie Curtis Crush Fever
Opening: Wednesday 21 February, 6-8pm Dates: 21 February - 16 March 2024
Embodying the sensation of a crush, Crush Fever delves into the texture of desire and the allure of fantasies that debilitate and consume the self. The use of 3D digital modelling and animation aims to establish an uncanny logic located in the familiar yet unattainable, one that dissolves the boundaries between reality and imagination.
The film welcomes viewers into the romantically helpless tale of a limbless horse and its cupid companion Eros, the god of love and sex, son of Aphrodite. Through the use of photogrammetry technology, this pewter metal cast is granted life in a digital daydream. The naive protagonist explores enchanting states of liquidity and reimagined merchandise displays imbued with both humour and discomfort. These recognisable yet distorted environments intend to deconstruct our understanding of secure material locations, mirroring the disillusionment experienced in crippling states of desire.
Situated in a reinterpretation of the archetypal waiting room, the installation references ‘non-places,’ a term conceived by French anthropologist Marc Augé used to describe the quotidian spaces of transience that reduce humans to anonymous entities. Here, viewers are implicated in a liminal state of waiting, an interstitial non-place that mimics the perpetual reach towards obsessions that we ultimately cannot grasp.
Recipient of the Bus Projects VCA Grad Award (Bus Screen).
Ponie Curtis is a digital media and installation artist living and working on the unceded lands of the Boonwurrung and Woi-wurrung Wurundjeri peoples of the Eastern Kulin Nation. She is committed to finding new forms of creative expression, specifically in relation to ideas surrounding impulsive infatuation through recontextualising luxury brands, advertisement schemes and the seductive charm of capital. Her dizzying abstractions of coded motifs mimic the obsessive yet disorientating passion we often feel for a distant someone or something. Ponie completed her Bachelor of Fine Art at the Victorian College of the Arts in 2023. She has exhibited her work in shows including Staff Discount at TCB (2023) and Best Before at Kings Artist-Run (2022), and was also a recipient of the Stuart Black Memorial Scholarship in 2022 and 2023.
