Discover Claire Healy and Sean Cordeiro’s spirit of adventure and their uncanny ability to transform the everyday into something extraordinary in this first major museum survey in Australia showcasing 20 of their most significant pieces as well as a newly-commissioned sculpture.

Be awed and intrigued by their playful reinvention of prefabricated structures and the conversion of everyday objects into phenomenal sculptures and installations. Discover how these immense works also broach concerns relevant to people’s daily lives, such as the cost of living, problems of overpriced real-estate, the need for space, consumerism and the desire for things to be better in the future than they are today.

Your attachment to place and property is questioned in several works looking at the concept of ‘home’ where Healy and Cordeiro have acquired, dismantled and reassembled large-scale domestic dwellings – an entire suburban house in the Cordial Home Project (2003), a well-loved caravan in Wohnwagen (Flatpack / Past Times) (2006-07), and an old Queensland farm house in Not Under My Roof (2008).

Explore how the artist’s nomadic lifestyles are reflected in works referencing transportation and the practicalities of storing and moving material possessions. In Par Avion (2011), a Cessna 172 aeroplane is dissected into 70 small pieces which are posted to the exhibition destination and re-arranged into the shape of the original plane. The monumental Life Span (2009), made from a stack of 175,218 used VHS video tapes, equates the number of hours it would take to view these tapes consecutively with the average human life expectancy in 1976 (the year the VHS tape was released).

Some installations will challenge your notions of security, such as the daring new commission Stasis (2012), which creates a sense of potential accident or threat, positioning a suspended light aircraft outside the MCA’s building.

Admire the sheer scale and ambition of Healy and Cordeiro’s works in this free exhibition, while also being reminded of the wreckage and destruction that goes hand-in-hand with human aspiration.

*image:
Deceased Estate 2004, lambda print, Collection of Newcastle Art Gallery, ©the artists
Photo: Chrastian Schnur