Engages,

Kat Clarke, Maggie Brown, Chantal Fraser and Ann Fuata, Andrew Goodman, Kristin McIver, Drew Pettifer, Kent Wilson The West Wing: Commodity/Fetishism

Opening: Thursday 20 January, 6-8pm Dates: 20-30 January 2011

Bus Projects continues its offsite series of explorations into the nature of spatial artistic practices with a new project exploring site-specificity and consumption. Featuring new work by Kat Clarke, Maggie Brown, Chantal Fraser and Ann Fuata, Andrew Goodman, Kristin McIver, Drew Pettifer and Kent Wilson.

Melbourne Central provides an ideal site in which to frame and mediate the interdependence of spatial practice with the concept of site-specificity, and the works in this exhibition will be anchored in the conditions of the site and its surroundings.

Responding to its location within Melbourne Central, a shopping and entertainment complex that reproduces as spectacle the very urban phenomena it has displaced (laneways, traditional pubs, alternative arts spaces etc…), this exhibition focuses on artistic practices that critically reproduce the conditions of their spectacle context (consumption, obsolescence, nostalgia and longing) as a strategy to forestall their own displacement into commodities. By setting up this feedback between the logic of site and practice, the show will institute a productive inter-play between the various layers of reality and materiality that comprise the everyday both in and beyond Melbourne Central.

The exhibition opens on Thursday 20 January, 6-8pm at The West Wing, Level 2, Melbourne Central opposite Gloria Jeans and next to the ‘hanging garden’.