Cusp:installation views
Photo credits: Images 1and 2 Christian Capurro
Image 3: Julie Shiels
Cusp
Project Space/Spare Room
23-27 Cardigan St, Carlton
Friday 4 - Friday 25 June
Launched by Jason Smith - CEO and Director, Heidi Museum of Modern Art
Thursday 3 June 5.30 - 7.30pm
When a person undergoes a surgical procedure the operation is booked, the risks are assessed and the date anticipated. On the day, the body is prepped and dressed in a special gown but as consciousness slips away, the actual event becomes a void. The only memories of the experience are the ones that sit either side of that empty space.
Cusp materialises this void in memory by casting the empty space in packaging that once held surgical implements and devices used in the operating theatre.
Some of the cast objects look like alien weapons or contraptions from sci-fi movies. Others resemble probes used to pierce and penetrate the body in a gothic chamber of horrors. Will future archaeologist or anthropologists sift through our ruins and exclaim at our barbarity? Or will they marvel at the extraordinary ingenuity and careful management of the suffering associated with illness and disease in our time. Click here for the catalogue
Avoca - back streets
Returning from Ararat
‘Sleeping with knives’ series 2009 ink jet on Canson Canvas 60 x 89cm
Julie Shiels: sleeper
Exhibition dates: 1 April–10 May 2009
Monash Gallery of Art
860 Ferntree Gully Road
Wheelers Hill
Sleeper, Julie Shiels’ new exhibition at Monash Gallery of Art is the culmination of a four-year project in which she has used discarded mattresses found on the streets of Melbourne as source material for her art.
The mattresses are used in a range of ways. Shiels fashions pyjamas from the upholstery, documents the array of weapons found secreted in the stuffing and in the series Bedtime stories binds their ornate fabrics into artist’s books.
In his catalogue essay Jason Smith, Director of Heide Museum of Modern Art states ‘ Sleeper reminds us why artists undertake the mysterious, compulsive acts they do to externalise their visions and contemplations of the world we inhabit: they tell us it is necessary to look again, to not deny some of the terrors of the everyday, and to see strange beauty and seek solace in some simple (and not so simple) things.
Tues to Fri: 10am–5pm, Sat & Sun: 12–5pm
Closed: Mondays and public holidays
There was something immediately recognisable in the shape of the trees, they were rangy but with perfect canopies.They had been the backdrop of Rome’s famous sites for centuries, the traveller had seen them before in postcards and paintings. Grand, majestic and emblematic of the city, they were of humble origin - the common pine tree shaped through time by judicious pruning.
If I only had one more hour with you.
Fly curtains in Public Space - Rocca Antica - 45 minutes from Rome
They flock together – patterns across the wall: a collection of objects cast from the empty spaces left behind in plastic packaging. Sourced from the tool box, the toy box and the domestic environment, the original moulds are the wallpaper of our daily lives – ever present but barely noticed.
Flock is on show at fortyfivedownstairs (45 Flinders Lane, Melbourne) from July 23nd to August 2nd.
