Exhibits,

Michelle Sakaris The Warmth of the Curve

Opening: Thursday 17 May, 5-7pm Dates: 17 May-2 June 2012

THE WARMTH OF THE CURVE is a series of new works by Michelle Sakaris that explores cross-cultural practices of ritual walking. The exhibition taking place at BUS Projects presents a dynamic combination of performance, video and found objects which invite audience involvement. Audiences are encourage to extend the performance out into public space by following one of the propositional self-directed walks.

THE WARMTH OF THE CURVE focuses on the ritual of walking around a sacred object or site, drawing the form of a circle in space (circumambulation). This ritual appears again and again across a broad range of cultural and religious traditions. The circle is universally seen as enduring, complete and perfect, transcendental and that which is beyond the material. The encircled objects are considered sacred and include books, trees, baptismal fonts, buildings and mountains. THE WARMTH OF THE CURVE extends this ritual to a new set of objects that can be seen simultaneously as ordinary and symbolically loaded. To develop this project Sakaris has been working with a number of places of worship in the City of Melbourne. At the core of Sakaris’ project is the question: can we experience ritual in a secular context?

Michelle Sakaris is a visual artist based in Melbourne working across video, installation and performance. Her main interest is to seek out overlaps between religious ritual and conceptual art. She graduated form the VCA in 2009 and since then has had a number of solos exhibitions including Inhabiting Ritual at Kings ARI (2010), Architectures at Rear View Gallery (2011) and Theophany at White Street Project (2012). In 2010 she was the winner of the Blake Prize John Coburn Emerging Artists Award.

Michelle Sakaris’s project is be presented at BUS Projects as part of the 2012 Next Wave Festival.

http://nextwave.org.au/event/the-warmth-of-the-curve/