Exhibits,

Kel Glaister, Tamsin Green, Ardi Gunawan, Carl Scrase Floats Like A Brick Doesn’t

Opening: Tuesday 22 May, 6-8pm Until 09/06/07 Dates: 22 May-9 June 2007

‘Floats like a brick doesn’t’ takes a whimsical approach to the irresistible forces of gravity. This is a light show that supports a heavy subject. The four artists involved each have an idiosyncratic approach to found objects, propositional sculpture and video. Their aim is to temporarily suspend, or at least confuse, gravitational forces. The approach to gravity in this exhibition is both literal and allegorical. The gravity resisted in the show is that of potentially falling apples. But Floats like a brick doesn’t also forms an allegorical relationship to the larger problem of making, and placing works in context of the gallery which is subject to its own entropic forces. These are ironic statements where the objects become both a tool and a proxy for the artists and their relationship to inevitable factors.

There can be a somewhat melancholic relationship to gravity, as in Kel Glaister’s work. Her cynical manipulations of found objects engage the conditions of material relations to make a doomed but humorous attempt to somehow overcome Newton, paradox and physical expectations. Tamsin Green, however, takes a more baffling approach in her video works. The position of the viewer in relation to ordinary experiences and gravitational expectations becomes uncertain. This work traverses a space between the mundane experience of the kitchen tap and something else that suggests the psychological anxiety of water torture. Ardi Gunawan’s constructions disguise themselves as displaced events of hard rubbish day while engaging with conditions of photography and theatre. The appearance of the constructions positions the viewer as an invader in this freeze frame, a moment that is both uncanny and unhinged. In Scrase’s use of multiple objects the gravitational plane is multiplied. As such the entire world as becomes threatening in a way it wasn’t really before, while the viewer is simultaneously denied the viewer of any access to a posited space of protection. His reconfiguring of found objects into strange and almost social grouping has a sweetly paranoid ring to it. Floats like a brick doesn’t is an exhibition built around approaches to gravity, entropy and other inevitable things. There is a shared whimsy in the use of materials, and ambiguous attitudes that range from the deeply cynical to the lovingly disastrous. In the end, we’re chained to the world and we all gotta pull.

http://www.tamsingreen.com.au/curatorial/objects-in-space/
http://www.realtimearts.net/article/issue80/8667
http://2008.nextwave.org.au/festival/projects/32-objects-in-space