In Perceived Aesthetic and Moral Tension, lightly mediated sculpture and video are used to interrogate civil land use through the lens of environmental cataclysm. The works employ a contrast of affects, reflecting feelings of both loss and complicity evoked by ambivalence towards the material histories of domestic, civil and recreational settings.
This exhibition was presented in Metro Art’s Gallery Two, and was facilitated by Nextdoor ARI.
View further documentation on Nextdoor ARI’s website.
The catalog essay Documents of Tension was written by Georgie O’Brien, and a public discussion with the artist was recorded on the final day of the exhibition by Edge of The Pit Podcast.
Ambivalent Scrapings was partially funded through a BEMAC Quick Response Grant, supported by RASN.
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Photo credit: Landen Callender
Photo credit: Xavier Ryan-McInally
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Rock Phrenology, 2022.
Rock Phrenology, 2022, 1580 x 790 x 570mm, copper tubing, PVC book bags, quartz and iron tailings, gold ore, pyrite, dried flood silt, blue stone ballast, halite, ceramic dust, recycled aggregate, demolition concrete, citrine, assorted gemstones, SES issued sandbags, Photo credit: Xavier Ryan-McInally
Rock Phrenology is a hybridized sculpture which takes formal cues from clothes racks and children's book racks/learning aids. The work catalogues and combines several kinds of stones and earthen material found within urban, domestic, civil and recreational settings. They are all end user materials which are readily identifiable and taken from their point of use. Contained within book bags are the remnants of childhood obsessions, old works and previous installations, disused gold mines, derelict construction sites, flood debris, etc.By deterritorializing these materials and placing them within a sculptural / gallery context, it is possible to diminish any perceived higher value and view the minerals along a more equalizing, totalizing plane.
Materials such as the quartz and iron tailings recovered from a mining shaft in Omeo on Gunaikurnai country for example have the possibility to contain gold ore or small fragments of gold. Bluestone, likely quarried on Jagera/Ugarapul land by Mt Marrow Blue Metal Quarries Pty. Ltd, and recycled concrete, taken from any number of civil or commercial demolition sites, have been liberated from their blue-collar roles as railway ballast on the Ipswich/Springfield train line, and construction aggregate from the south-western suburbs respectively. Similarly, the pink rock salt, faddish new-age cure-all turned bougie decorator piece, loses this status of eminence once crushed and placed into book bags alongside common river stones and clumps of flood silt.
Ambivalend Scrapings, 2018-2022.
Ambivalend Scrapings, 2018-2022, 470 x 2800 x 200mm (group, approximate dimensions) 230 x 110 x 80mm (individual, approximate dimensions), wild clay, wire book easel, various brick shelves.
Photo credit: Xavier Ryan-McInally.
Common understandings of land use refer to the management and modification of the natural environment, with the intent to improve and maintain civilian welfare and standards of living. In the civil realm, new property development, public facilities upgrades, roadway maintenance and so on, all require visceral articulations of dirt, stone and earthen materials.
Under the guise of the more edifying, revealing lense typical of a paranoid orientation, Ambivalent Scrapings exposes and documents these machinations of colonial agency in the landscape. As an excavator shaves away sections of cleared land, its blade leaves a smooth surface in clay deposits. Certain clays stick to the blade and are scraped off by hand, revealing the smooth dozered edge visible on one side, opposite a more wrinkled, striated side. These clay pieces can sometimes be found cast aside in piles.
Exemplar pieces have been collected from sites in the outer suburbs between Brisbane and Ipswich CBD's, and have been fired as is to preserve their forms. This is a permanent change on the molecular level, solidifying their permanence as document-objects, evidence of ambivalent actions within the built environment.
Smooth / Striated Space Load Out, 2022.
Photo credit: Landen Callender
Smooth / Striated Space Load Out, 2022, 01:16:18 run time, looped, single channel analog to digital video. Photo credit: Xavier Ryan-McInally
Smooth / Striated Space is the name given to the studio and rehearsal space I rented at a self-storage facility in Rocklea from May 17th 2021, until late February 2022 when it was inundated during the flooding event affecting the eastern coast of Australia. The name was borrowed from terms used by Deleuze and Guattari in A Thousand Plateaus, which define two ways in which space is structured (or used, inhabited, ordered, etc). Smooth spaces are fluid and nomadically inhabited, as in conservation areas, roadsides, public campgrounds, etc, while striated spaces are static and State-oriented, ie. libraries, institutions like a university, State funded mines, and public transport. They are either hierarchical or non-hierarchical, or like a self-storage facility, they contain elements of both. The units themselves are individually occupied for a variety of uses, with people entering at all times of day for a variety of reasons.
The establishment of this storage unit as a space was intended to provide myself with a fixed, standalone space to inhabit and make work in - a necessary, resistive reaction to the instability and constraints of domestic coliving arrangements. It brought together two seemingly opposing areas of practice, sculpture and live music performance, and as such I could not categorically define its use as either smooth or striated.
Smooth / Striated Space Load Out documents the retrieval of personal property from this storage space post-flood. It borrows language from the live music discourse, where load-in and load-out refer to the processes of moving a performer's gear into or out of a venue. The video is presented in its full unabridged form, serving as a primary, objective source documenting grief and personal loss.