Western Front 2007

• Cloaked, Caught and Carefree
• Wunderkammer

Cloaked, Caught and Carefree

Dates 15 June - 7 July 2007
Venue The Caretaker's Cottage, Building KDR, Kingswood campus

Cloaked, Caught and Carefree is the latest exhibition in a innovative art research project Dubiously Wholesome by the contemporary artist and performer Tanya Richards. The project's main aim is to create a series of works that replace the gallery with the home and offers a private art experience for the participant or viewer.

Cloaked, Caught or Carefree explores the dualities in the human condition caused by the tension between the desire for conformity and individuality in the construction of self. It focuses upon the development of the everyday individual and the masks created to cope with the expectations upon one's own behaviour. It asks, 'What is behind these masks?' and answers through an exploration of the mystery, distraction, boredom, fantasy and psychosis that lurks behind repetitious everyday experiences.

In exploring the dualities in the human condition, Cloaked, Caught and Carefree looks at gendered identities and the impact they have on the dualities of the self, from the perspective of the artist’s own experience of constructing identity. The thematic content and aesthetic realisation of the work revolves around a process of hybridisation of video and aerial performance. The work juxtaposes the strength and skill required to perform aerial acrobatics with a sense of helplessness, pain and constraint invoked by the body language of the performer. This contradiction is used to express the limitations and expectations of weaving feminine and masculine aspects of identity, resulting in a duality within oneself. It celebrates strength as well as alluding to the constraints of gendered identity.

Tanya Richards
My current art practice has revolved around an exploration of the multiplicity of self. It works on the premise that the individual consists of multiple selves that are necessary in the individual's ability to cope with the forced façades of the everyday. In other words, it allows us to cope with the rules of society, culture and the everyday, and still maintain the freedom of individuality and not be controlled by that which conforms and conditions us.

Issues of gender identity and my own experience of constructing self have acted as a focus point for my investigation of multiple selves. These core concepts have been realised and explored through video, performance and installation art using my experience as a professional aerialist to inform my studio practice.

Image above
Cloaked, Caught and Carefree
Performance and video installation
Tanya Richards, 2006.

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Wunderkammer

Dates 6 July - 21 September 2007
Venue UWS Art Gallery, Building AD, Werrington North campus

Cassandra Hard Lawrie and Philip Spark share a fascination with objects, building upon the tradition of Wunderkammer, where objects were displayed according to the whim of the collector. By presenting objects that are fragmented and obscure they intend to draw on the capacity of the artefact to incite wonder as it represents that which is otherworldly and not tempo centric.

Both artists within their respective sculptural installations utilise scrap material suggesting the journey of things from usefulness, to discarded rubbish through to the revival of an object as a semaphore.

Cassandra Hard Lawrie
I am interested in what is shared without reliance on language and what traverses the constructed boundaries of individual cultures. For me, the 'esoteric' symbolises the opposition of insider/outsider and familiar and unfamiliar. The uninformed viewer is 'outside' the secret coding of the esoteric image, yet as a historic referent it is familiar at a deeper level of the psyche.

The 'renaissance Wunderkammer' represents an intuitive and indiscriminate approach to collecting, before the slavish approach of classification developed in the collections of the Enlightenment. As a home for predominantly the 'rare' object, the Wunderkammer represented an embracement of diversity. The idea of the 'historical displacement of meaning' (and the displaced semantic image) symbolises the inevitability of change, and that what we know to be familiar today will shift soon thereafter. All three subjects can celebrate the notion of diversity, transformation and what can be understood without reliance on the superficially familiar - and this is symbolic of the transient experience of the multi-cultural communities of Western Sydney of the 21st century.

Ultimately, the imagery of esoteric doctrine, the Wunderkammer and the displaced semantic image can offer a symbolic discourse on the nature of 'belief'. A place under transformation challenges the systems of belief of both those that enter the 'place' and those that understood that 'place' in its former nature. Such a place is Western Sydney.

Image above
Origins (1)
Timber, mdf, resin, pigment and found objects
Cassandra Hard Lawrie, 2005.

Philip Spark
There is a desire to understand by counting, calibrating and analysing data. A community can be measured in a number of ways, income, ethnicity, religion, age etc. I am imagining devices that dig deeper. If we can measure the miasma that surrounds us, the blue of the sky above, courage, fear, memory. If we can enumerate the hint, the tinge, the shade (in the supernatural sense) then surely we will be a little closer to finding out what's going on out there (in the west for example).

Most people have a wonder room, whether internal, external or both. These objects are taken from mine.

Image above
A Device For Collecting and Measuring Miasma (Incomplete)
Steel, copper and brass
Philip Stark, 2006.

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