Exhibits,

Theia Connell flipped grip

Catalogue:
“An Urban Choreography of Civic Disobedience”
Text by Miriam McGarry
2018

Developed from work made in the Republic of Korea on a 2017 Asialink residency, Connell’s new work flipped grip at Bus sits at the intersection of immersive installation, performance and video.

At Yongsan Park in Seoul, Connell staged and documented a performance with four pole dancers and one B-Boy, who danced, stretched and moved on and around a field of public gym equipment. The gym objects, embodying both utility and ambiguity in their sleek forms, are used as props as the dancers imagine new ways of performing with them. At once sexy and awkward, the choreography that formed was dramatically unfamiliar in its public context.

At first conceived as a challenge to the agendas of civic infrastructure and the censoring of the sensual body in public, this work has slipped, through context and edit, in to something that floats between Korea and Australia as an exploration of coded movement, structural support and the collapse of the represented and the real. 

• Theia Connell b. 1990, lives and works in Hobart. She completed a Bachelor of Arts at the University of Melbourne in 2010 (Art History/Anthropology), and in 2014 completed a Bachelor of Fine Arts (Visual Art) in Sculpture and Spatial Practice at the Victorian College of Arts, University of Melbourne. Theia is currently undertaking her Honours year at the University of Tasmania, where she has received an Arts Honours Scholarship and a Tasmania Honours Scholarship.

Since 2014, Connell has exhibited frequently across Australia and internationally in her capacity as a solo artist, as one half of a collaborative partnership (a form of working she often seeks out) and as a participating artist in curated exhibitions. In 2017 she undertook international residencies in Athens, Greece at the Snehta Residency, and the Republic of Korea, where she was a 2017 Asialink Arts resident at Incheon Art Platform. Connell is Co-Founder and Director of Visual Bulk, an experimental art space in Hobart, and will be participating in the 2018 SITUATE Arts Lab. You can see things at www.theiaconnell.com.