Exhibits,
Ian Wadley Room To Live Again
Opening: Tuesday 12 August, 6-8pm Dates: 12-30 August 2008
Combining audio, photography, installation, and an artist-residency with a twist, Room To Live Again is a show about living nowhere in particular and feeling at home anywhere; about leaving home for work and not being sure if you’ve arrived; and the eternal question of when to go home again and where exactly that might be.
One end of the space is a “residency”, furnished with a couch, sleeping bag, lamp, guitar and laptop, where the artist will live and work for 3 weeks. At the other end is an “exhibition” of larger photographic prints – in the residential end, screen images and smaller prints will be available for the audience to view and leaf through. The artist inhabits the space, living and working on audio (and visual) projects. Visitors are welcome to interrupt with enquiries. Sound is an integral part of the exhibition, as musical as it is improvised.
Ian Wadley, a musician and photographer, has lived the last 3 years out of a suitcase, since a brief tour of Europe (with avant-rock band Bird Blobs) turned into a year in Berlin, 5 months back in Melbourne, then another year travelling in the USA, UK, Europe and Japan. He has never stayed more than 5 weeks at any address in this time (much less as a rule), traveling mostly for musical reasons, but also pausing to live in Leipzig, Lisbon and the Basque district of Spain. In 3 years Ian Wadley has made tens of thousands of photographs (ranging from ’serious photography’ to tourist snaps) since buying the first of three Contax i4R cameras, days before leaving to go on a brief tour.
Room To Live Again is, in part, a reconsideration of an earlier (and similar) exhibition Room To Live (Arch Lane, 1989) which in turn was inspired by the Fall album of the same name (lampooning as it does the WW2 Nazi expansionist policy of that name). It is also, in some ways, a response to the current rent crisis as much as it is an attempt to redefine notions of an “artist residency”.