| Description |
BORDERLANDS presents the work of the artists Christian Edwardes and Tom Hall, and of the writers Lee Mackinnon and Frank Brown. The exhibition acknowledges the edge of systems and the hinterland between places and social classifications; they are areas of flux and sometimes conflict. This exhibition is an examination of this relationship. The artists and the writers are navigating their way around and through discussions, joining each other’s standpoints. The works presented in BORDERLANDS and the relationship between the two exhibiting artists is one of boundaries; BORDERLANDS shifts and tests the borders of these two artists’ different ways of thinking, forcing the work together to deal with difference.
The artists have invited Lee Mackinnon and Frank Brown to have a parallel discussion on the subject of BORDERLANDS through which they explore new territories and take defined positions relating to the two different processes employed by the artists. They discuss and foster debate around the processes in which the artists work, basing the accompanying texts on these discussions.
Christian Edwardes’ work is a series of ideological islands and are a reference to the separation between an idea of utopian ‘place’ and homemade attempts to reconstruct it. The work comprises of drawings and photographed constructions made from materials found in the home: from the contents of kitchen cupboards to domestic furniture. The islands set out the possibility of a transformation of space and physical ‘stuff’ through the act of making and representing objects.
Tom Hall will present an ‘unreal reconstruction’ of the library repository in Dallas. This consists of basic elements that the artist feels describe the room from which JFK was assassinated referencing the explosive political act that took place. Built out of cardboard — materials linked to storage or packaging and to the artifice of the theatre — a space within a space is constructed. The room is not a representation of the actual space but is designed from hearsay, media coverage and conspiracy plots of the assassination. The work looks to a collective idea of space and events, and draws contemporary parallels to the public’s construction of the terrorist here. We do have a ‘feeling’ of what it is, and as we begin to draw the threads of perception towards a ‘real’ thing, media and discrimination fills in the blanks of a fictionalised truth. |