They’ll be starting at six, with Leigh Robb (PICA’s curator) leading the talks. I’ll be pouring drinks and looking surly behind the bar.
Chelsea Hopper
Artist Statement:
For the last two years or so, Chelsea Hopper has wanted to realise a project on failure. Failure is something fundamental not only to art but to human conduct too. When we speak sometimes we speak our loudest when we mis-communicate.
When things don’t work often something better than expected happens. Exhibitions that fail fascinate the artist. On failing a space is opened up for the viewer, a possibility for dialogue. If something doesn’t work out there is more to talk about, and there is a reason to develop something in the future. If an artist makes a perfect artwork, that moment of perfection is when that artistic practice is no longer of any interest, and there is no point in making more work. As such, the idea of failure informs everything Chelsea does. Her work is informed by the underlying question ‘what is failure?’: and suggests that perhaps failure is when something is incomplete and open to possibilities.
Although this overall notion of failing has become imperative to the artist’s practice, its differing meanings have filtered into ideas of disappointment. In recent times, setting things up to fail has become an important part of Chelsea’s aesthetic. She seeks to deny what people generally want out of art, which is something better than normal things.
Chelsea’s work is attached to the limits of purposefulness. If something is discarded you can read that and see that its been rejected and there is something terribly beautiful in that. Formal things are incredibly important to the artist and to the practice of image making she engages in. One might introduce this topic with the following generalisation: an image comes into being as the result of a process. The process may occur as an indeterminate exercise or as a series of carefully defined tastes. It may occur within the context of everyday life, as in the acting out of an idea.
The artist’s current working methodology often begins with small, quirky and trivial points of departure that instigate a sometimes ridiculous process, manufactured narrative, or un-academic research method that relies heavily on intuition. The outcomes range from quite traditional objects and drawings, to live actions, text and photography, and in a gallery context act as windows into a larger network of encounters, processes and narratives that might otherwise never have been related.
Residency Description:
The focus of Chelsea Hopper’s PICA residency will be to continue dealing with interpretations and representations of failure and disappointment outside an educational institution. After recently completing her Honours degree she feels this will be a great opportunity to explore these interests and allow dialogue with the public. Primarily having a studio will allow the artist to collate and curate various projects that she has been working on throughout this year, but haven’t executed in an appropriate space.
Liang Luscombe
Artist Statement:
Although primarily a painter, 2010 has seen Liang Luscombe’s work expand into more varied disciplines such as performance and installation. Specifically using various types of materials in order to question the concept of value and value systems, she is concerned with the way that value is created and or exchanged.
Liang has addressed this through her painting practice, making three-dimensional paintings on board that interlock into one another to create installation. The paintings are pushed up against found, pre-fabricated materials such as packaging, AD DAS and Perspex; materials that are often throw away or found in Two Dollar shops. The pre-fabricated materials are used as differing surfaces (often textured, rippled, patterned) that create visual dialogue with the painted surface of the assemblage. Dialogues arise between ‘high art’ materials (painting, the canvas) and non-traditional art materials that have associations beyond her craft.
Painting has also become a leaping-off point for other forms that Liang’s work has taken; in her most recent work Showwuff Bags, 2010 an image from one of her previous paintings was used as branding to develop a show bag stall in which key rings, wine glasses, temporary tattoos and rain coats etc were sold during the performance. Essentially Liang sold useless trinkets, not unique items but a proliferation of facsimiles, carrying the image of a unique item. In that process she wished to present value as a slippery scale. Where exactly does worth lay? In this work the viewer either accepts the idea or dismisses it as trash. In this way Liang’s practice connects with Michael Landy and Sydney artists Bababa International.
Recently Liang has become interested in the Hollywood disaster film and the collision of popular spectacle with current political and environmental issues. The contemporary disaster film both passes comment upon and participates willingly in the flawed logics that it identifies. A form of high paradox, these films afford us the ironic thrill of viewing our own demise for entertainment.
Residency Description:
During Liang Luscombe’s residency at PICA she plans to make larger painting assemblages that slot into one another, allowing varied and complex assemblage. The film stills will be used as source material; abstracted through collage, then painted. The installation will connect with the fragmented, short, sharp editing narrative that occurs in film. Each board painting will be similar to a film cut and it is through the group of panels that a narrative is formed. The use of imagery will further the atmosphere of nihilistic humour permeating this work. This work will be a reflection of current global concerns; however, Liang hopes to bring a dark and humorous twist to these ideas.
This project allows interaction between subject matter and materials to manifest in oblique ways; both the disaster film and Liang’s choice of materials are products/ symptoms of over-consumption and high capitalism. This project will open up her work to a humorous yet critical language – a direction she has taken in the recent Showwuff Bags project. This residency will also enable Liang Luscombe to investigate spatial interactions similar to the work of Helen Johnston, Jessica Stockholder and Nathan Gray.
Lucy Moore
Artist Statement:
Lucy Moore’s practice negotiates patterns of experience and memory through constellations of object, image and film. Making work might involve transforming an existing image or collected object, or repeating a remembered activity. Each work involves recollection (of a very recent or long distant event), but the use of gesture, whether to change the appearance of something, to reconfigure it or to repeat a particular process, interrupts this recollection with its own agency: memories are often filtered through the structures which construct them anew each time they are recalled.
This contingent, unstable character of memory can equally be applied to art objects and images – their status shifting according to their mode of presentation, the degree to which they refer to earlier artistic practices, and their relation to other objects or images also presented.
Residency Description:
During her PICA residency Lucy will research and make a film which uses the salt lakes on Rottnest Island and at Lake Macleod, near Canarvon as a starting point. She is interested in the convergence of disparate concerns and experiential states that might be inferred from these particular environments – economic and industrial concerns in the mining activity that occurs at the Dampier Salt mine at Lake Macleod; the ambitions of those who attempt to break land speed records on these flat terrains; the intensification of tastes which salt produces; the disturbance of the ‘self’ which occurs in desert-like landscapes; and the illusory mirroring which happens when the lakes flood. Salt lakes are at once places invested with economic and commercial value and environments conducive to less easily evaluated sensorial experiences of speed, taste and disorientation. This multiplicity is what Lucy would like to try and capture in the film.
Alongside making the film, Lucy Moore will use the studio to continue to make collages, photographs and objects. These might be related directly to the film or be continuations of series of works she has already begun.
Posted on March 21, 2011
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