Olga Cironis, Mountain of Words, 2017, metal loom, table and chair, sensors, speakers and amp, human hair, natural fibre, performance.
Olga Cironis, Mountain of Words, 2017, metal loom, table and chair, sensors, speakers and amp, human hair, natural fibre, performance.
Andrew Sunley Smith, Carbon Supremacy: Continual Combustion / Continuous Exhaustion No 8, 2015, plantation plywood, Tasmanian oak, teak, oxygen, propane, stainless steel, diameter, 1200mm × depth 130mm.
Clyde McGill, Dolorosa, 2015, mixed media, performance, dimensions variable.
Susanna Castleden, 1:1 Airplane Wing, 2015, 4.16 × 12.69m, rubbing on gesso on paper maps. Photo by Robert Frith at Acorn. Courtesy of the artist.
Susanna Castleden, 1:1 Gangway, 2016, 3.2 × 15.4m, rubbing on gesso on paper, maps, shown in SPAN as a vinyl banner. Photo by Robert Frith at Acorn. Courtesy of the artist.
Tanya Lee, Curtilage, 2016, 3 channel video, dimensions and duration variable. Photo by Jacqueline Ball.
Span brings together five artists based in Perth and Fremantle, to examine movement and distance. Curator Ric Spencer describes the exhibition as “a response to contemporary issues of globalisation”: it deals with boundaries mapped and crossed, and boundaries impossible to cross.
Whilst the exhibition examines the global, it returns repeatedly to the subject of the human body. In Olga Cironis’s Mountain of Words, hair from thousands of participants is woven into a ribbon, growing further while in the gallery. In Tanya Lee’s video work Curtilage, a person in one house brushes the hair and teeth of a person in the one next door, using an ad hoc extended device to traverse the ambiguous space – the ‘curtilage’ – between two homes.
In Andrew Sunley Smith’s sculptural works, the forms of machine parts are replicated from burnt wood. Sunley Smith draws on his own experiences living o -grid to examine the use of finite resources.
A global experience is made personal in Clyde McGill’s interactive performance work Dolorosa. In the story of a family, forcibly displaced and searching for a safe home, McGill’s suite of paintings function as back- drops and as stations, stopping points within a narrative. Overhead wires are attached to amplifiers and ‘played’ with sticks by the audience, who become complicit in the displacement.
Moving at once outwards and inwards, Span wrestles with ever-present conflicts and intimacies, measuring the distance between bodies.
Span
Fremantle Arts Centre
4 February – 26 March
Interview with curator Ric Spencer:
Elysha Rei’s exhibition Shirozato to Shinju (White Sugar and Pearls) at Umbrella Studio Contemporary Arts, Townsville QLD, explores the interconnected histories of the Japanese diaspora in Australia.
Described as “a space for reflection, remembrance, and the sharing of truth”, Kattidj Nagãr, now showing at John Curtin Gallery, is dedicated to the Aboriginal people who once resided at the Carrolup Settlement in Western Australia.
With an approach to artmaking drawn from the “fieldwork of life”, twin brothers and artistic collaborators Man&Wah, who are now showing at 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art, use plant migration to explore duality and movement.
Taja Vaetoru’s debut solo exhibition Idol, now showing .M Contemporary, explores their Polynesian ancestry, questions of tradition and worship, and how to intersect the past with the present.
An exhibition at Perc Tucker Regional Gallery pays tribute to Staffordshire-born Josiah Wedgwood (1730-1795) and his eponymous pottery company, featuring rare, valuable and ornate pieces, as well as “grandma’s good china”.
In his first commercial presentation in Australia, one of Mexico’s most acclaimed contemporary artists uses his architectural background to create poetic, finely calibrated sculptural investigations of spatial perception, balance and equilibrium. Jose Dávila’s Physics of Uncertainty is now showing at COMA Gallery.
