Exhibits,

Jesse Dyer Tapping In

Opening: Wednesday 29 November, 6–8pm Dates: 29 November — 23 December, 2017

Tapping In
Jessie Dyer
29.11.17 - 23.12.17

Rubber is collected from the garden and used to recreate products and consumables: bike tyre, hot water bottle, sneaker sole, ‘eraser’. The intimacy of these objects underscores a personal responsibility for consumption and the political and environmental problems of globalised industries. In the gallery context the work asks how artistic practices are implicated in environmental exploitation and how they could be reconfigured in a sustainable and renewable way.

The process of producing rubber involves ‘drawing’ latex from the bark of the rubber tree. Latex functions as a medium for knowledge. In that the technologies and inventions that come from it are contained within latex itself. The tree is an argument for the function of plants as sustainable data centres and ecosystems as information networks.
Embedded in these networks are the politics of rubber’s production — in particular, colonialism and the use of slave labour to harvest it — and the way these issues are erased through corporate greenwashing.

Jesse Dyer is an emerging artist based in Melbourne. His work uses a combination of sculptural, photographic and written modes to investigate the relationship between the ecological and the archival. His web-based work ‘Infinite Library’, which explores the internet as an ecosystem, was developed as part of the SafARI 2016 program. His recent exhibitions include; ‘Perennial’ at CCP in 2017, ‘Great– Great– Grandplant’ at Seventh Gallery in 2016 and Awake at ACCA in 2015. In 2013 his essay ‘Une séance du cinéma’ was published in un Magazine.

Photography by Christo Crocker.