Walead Beshty (UK/USA), Nina Canell (Sweden/Germany), Natalya Hughes (Australia), Biljana Jancic (Australia), Ragnar Kjartansson (Iceland) with The National (USA), Alicja Kwade (Poland/Germany), Bridie Lunney (Australia), Rob McLeish (Australia/USA), Kate Newby (New Zealand/USA), Isabel Nolan (Ireland), Shinro Ohtake (Japan), Daniel von Sturmer (New Zealand/Australia), Ideas Platform | Eve Fowler (USA)
Curated by Alexie Glass-Kantor with Talia Linz
An Imprecise Science explores how with idiosyncratic intent we each determine our own processes for embodying experience or tracking life lived. Inscription of space, time and materiality, through word, gesture or abandonment of power structures creates the potential for parallel narratives to ferment and for impermanence to take precedence over authority. An Imprecise Science underscores the ways that matter becomes immaterial; bodies and forms embrace ethereality, defying gravity and rebelling against the limitations of flesh or material. Acts of precarious balance, both human and inanimate, sit alongside deconstructive play and challenges to the constitution of substance and subject. A central tenet of An Imprecise Science is that of endurance, with works that look at the transformative potential of prolonged action. The exhibition proposes that any approach is an imperfect act, experiment or speculation. Here frailty and collapse commingle with resilience and forms of material, physical and psychic ascendance.
The 13 Australian and international artists presenting work in An Imprecise Science represent a cross-generational collective, none of whom have previously shown work at Artspace. Working across installation, video, performance, sculpture, painting, sound and word, An Imprecise Science will contaminate the Gunnery building to inhabit the various spaces through which visitors pass. As artworks congeal and seep into the crevices of the building’s architecture and our mind’s eye, the aim is to prompt a reawakening of a familiar space that is at once both public and highly personal. Indeed in this assembly of approaches, boundaries between works are blurred, veiled and obscured; ordinary materials are rendered sensual while the edifices of the body and the building are debased.
T.S. Eliot wrote: ‘What we call the beginning is often the end. And to make an end is to make a beginning.’ The end is where we start from... An Imprecise Science takes pride of place as Artspace’s first exhibition for 2015.
