Exhibits,

Adam Cruickshank, Robin Hungerford, Katie Lee, Ms&Mr, Dell Stewart, Erika Scott, Tim Woodward THANK YOU VERY MUCH

‘Thank you very much’ explores formal and conceptual tensions between order and transgression, restraint and excess. This inaugural exhibition at BUS Projects’ new galleries features work by Adam Cruickshank and Dell Stewart , Robin Hungerford, Katie Lee, Ms&Mr, Erika Scott and Tim Woodward. Amongst these practices we find a push and pull of control and improvisation through the reordering of space, architecture and personal histories; conflicts between organic and synthetic, form and function, as well as the fractious relationship between the art object and its place in the world. ‘Thank you very much brings’ together works by these seven artists to enjoy the fruits of a reciprocal action between attempts to create order whilst retaining spaces for subversion.

Working primarily with installation, Adam Cruickshank’s practice is a kind of sculptural collage which collates disparate materials and conditions. The work attempts a kind of poetic gathering; loose aggregations of various materials, processes, histories and cultural references come together and fall apart in a liminal field of play between ideas of object and subject. Cruickshank’s work has been shown internationally (UK, Germany, Netherlands) as well as at numerous galleries in Australia, particularly Melbourne. He teaches part time in the Faculty of Art, Design and Architecture at Monash University.

Robin Hungerford is an artist based in Sydney who works in the mediums of sculpture, performance and video. Simultaneously hilarious and horrific, strange and seductive, Hungerford’s work attempts to express something of the hallucinatory nature of contemporary globalised human experience playing itself out in increasingly technologically mediated realms. Notions of humanity, spirituality and autobiography combine with technology in an exploration of what the artist refers to as ‘the blurring boundaries between the organic and the synthetic’. Robin holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts from the University of Western Sydney and a Master of Visual Arts from the University of Sydney. His last solo show ‘The Streaming’ was held at Gallery 9 in December 2012.

Working with installation and sculptural form, Katie Lee’s practice is an exploration of the physical and psychological consequences of the built environment and our negotiations within it. Her materials — wood, rubber, steel, interrupted space, light, video, performative gesture, repetition, resistance, elasticity, fixed form — may be arranged sparsely, inducing agoraphobic sensations, or at other times they exhaust the available space, airlessly, suffocatingly. These affects, these sensations, act as the husk for the political context of the work, for underneath sit larger questions about governance, control, the arrangement and restrictions of public space, of accepted architectural design, of legislation, and of dominance. Lee regularly exhibits both in Australia and overseas, with recent exhibitions at the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, West Space and Gertrude Contemporary.

Since 2003, nova Milne have exhibited extensively as their ongoing entity ‘Ms&Mr’. Ms&Mr is an index attributed to the ongoing series of works performed by the artists or through their own biographical material. It is the direct material extension of nova Milne’s collaborative condition and their collapse of subjectivity. Through works such as those from their Videodromes for the Alone series, multiple sources of archival and new footage are reanimated, performed with and through archival selves to result in augmented relationships that defy single categorization. nova Milne harness the archive as a medium through which to communicate and gesture, and frequently raise the dead.

Dell Stewart’s work combines various processes often regarded as belonging to the world of craft (ceramics, textiles, animation) with a deeply embedded personal history (family, forests, elements). These practices and references assemble in immersive environments, often offering no clue to the boundary between the artwork and the space it occupies. Stewart has organised and participated in numerous exhibitions, and has shown extensively in Australia and overseas – recently at West Space and Craft Victoria – with a particular interest in fostering new material connections and collaboration.

Erika Scott Erika Scott is a Brisbane based artist who uses ideas of installation and ‘spatial-collage’ to investigate her own sites of pleasure, politics of taste, gender and value. Scott is a co-founder of the Brisbane artist run initiative, Accidentally Annie St Space and holds a Bachelor of Fine Art (honours) at the Queensland University of Technology.

Tim Woodward (1985) is an artist living and working in Melbourne. Mixing fictive or poetic reasoning with more formal methods of research, his practice is concerned with the manipulation of existing cultural objects and images. In 2012 he was the recipient of an Art & Australia Credit Suisse Contemporary Art Award, as well as the Ian Potter Cultural Trust Grant in support of further study in Salzburg, Austria. He has been included in recent exhibitions at The Jogja National Museum (2010), the Gallery of Modern Art, Brisbane (2011) and Contemporary Art Spaces Tasmania (2012). Tim Woodward is represented by Darren Knight Gallery, Sydney.