Exhibits,

Chris Bond Kraken: sixty six emails, a face and a gesture

Opening: Wednesday 2 September, 6-8pm Dates: 2-19 September 2015

GALLERY 4

In late 2014 Bond invented a Norwegian artist named Tor Rasmussen (also known as Kraken), who came to stay at his house for a six week domestic residency. During this time he caused significant upheaval, documented through photography, video, and textual correspondence. Bond plays Kraken, the residency program manager Julie Redfern, as well as a version of himself, simultaneously dissolving and expanding the self. Primary motivation for assuming these personae lies in the possibility of using channelled, imagined forces to break self-conditioned responses to ideas and materials, and imagine new ways of being, acting and making.

Chris Bond’s practice involves the invention and embodiment of fictional artists, writers, organisations and scenarios that assist with the creative act. In his painting practice, the process finds an end in the form of painted facsimiles of imagined books, magazines, exhibition catalogues and correspondence. Within institutional settings, his installations adopt the conventions of museum display to convey unlikely, often fantastic narratives. In each of these forms, Bond combines identity fabrication and closely-worked detail in order to play with knowledge and perception.

Bond studied Fine Art at RMIT in the mid-1990s and has exhibited since 2000. He undertook a studio residency at Gertrude Contemporary Art Spaces in 2001, and has since featured in numerous group and solo exhibitions, including being selected for ACCA’s annual New exhibition in 2008. Over the past decade he has been included in curated exhibitions at Kings ARI, Linden Gallery, Gertrude Contemporary Art Spaces, Blindside, Centre for Contemporary Photography, Bus, Heide Museum of Modern Art, National Gallery of Victoria, and Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney. In 2013, he was awarded the Arthur Guy Memorial Painting Prize. He is a candidate for a Master of Fine Arts (Visual Art) postgraduate degree at the Victorian College of the Arts, and is the recipient of an Australian Postgraduate Award. He lives and works in Melbourne.