Increase Your Uncertainty - A Constructed World
2 June - 26 July 2007
Australian Centre for Contemporary Art

A Constructed World, Ecstatic Torino, 2004, video still
[sourced from: http://www.accaonline.org.au]

Interactivity, collaboration, and their immanent conflicts are currently at play in the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, with the first major survey for A Constructed World, the artistic partnership of Melbourne artists Geoff Lowe and Jacqueline Riva. ACCA's gratuitously bold architectural structure is indeed a space of substantial difference to those ACW are more akin to exhibit within, yet the building’s overbearingly obese white-washed walls surprisingly complement the quirky and inviting artworks intriguingly well.

Upon entering the space, the viewer is immediately confronted with a work that embraces blatant interactivity. Change Platform is a circular gazebo-esque construction filled with a welcoming array of pillows, colouring books, stools and a guitar, all the while emblazoned with the oxymoronically didactic statement of democracy: “It’s all about love you fucking cunt.” Further into the gallery-space a makeshift windowless room has been assembled. Its entry and exit doors bluntly padlocked, the viewer may experience the interior of this brusquely built structure only within two certain days of the week, furthermore under the obligation of signing a legally-binding Social Contract, specifying a pledge to uphold strict confidentiality as to what has been witnessed within the space for “six calendar months” thereafter. An artistic statement that is both adamant and amusing, The Social Contract sees A Constructed World crudely countering critiques of their democratic collectivism by means of superimposing a forceful level of restriction upon their audience.

It is precisely this intrinsic investigation of collectivity that creates a sense of cohesion in what seems to be a manically disparate array of work. Relational aesthetics, perturbed notions of an artwork’s resolution, and the ominous push/pull of art versus non-art are all present within Increase Your Uncertainty, yet the breadth of trans-media and trans-conceptual exploration by no means negates the singularity of ACW’s practice. It is an evolving series of works, however, one that is fascinatingly consistent in its essential elements of practical inquiry. One such example of this evolution is the collaboration’s ongoing extensions of their Ecstatic Torino Project. Initially merely a cheaply constructed video of the two dancing ecstatically after their sincere joy of finding an apartment, its idiosyncratic imagery (that includes Jacqueline Riva dancing naked whilst covered with Post-It notes and Geoff Lowe dressed in a suit waving two large sheets of paper scrawled with the slogans ‘Stay in groups’ and ‘No need to be great’), has been revisited numerous times. Notable examples include the tacky appropriation by a Brazilian choreographer, as well as the most recent, Truck Dance, a performance in conjunction with Increase Your Uncertainty that featured two artists mimicking A Constructed World’s Ecstatic Torino dance publicly on the back of a truck throughout dispersed locations within Melbourne.

Since their formation in 1993, A Constructed World have presented an ongoing practice that is essentially thought-provoking in its levels of engagement. The complexities of their work are too often overlooked merely for a superficial assessment of their democracy as a ‘novelty’, yet it is this embrace of collectivity and the consequent range of artists and minds involved with their projects that makes the work of ACW such a diverse boiling-pot of thoughts, concepts and visual stimuli.

Raise High the Roofbeams
8th May 2007 – 19th May 2007
Bus Gallery (in association with Firstdraft Sydney)

Australia’s numerous artist-run initiatives (ARI’s) are without doubt an irreplaceable fixture of the local cultural community. In celebratory acknowledgement of this fact, Victorian ARI’s are currently coalescing in a collaborative season of exhibitions entitled Making Space. Ratifying the festival’s emphasis on the communal network, Melbourne space Bus has extended an invitation to interstate ARI’s excluded from Making Space to exhibit in a Melbourne locale. With an exhibition featuring increasingly popular artists Sean Rafferty, Michaela Gleave and Camille Serisier, renowned Sydney initiative and recipient of the aforementioned invitation, Firstdraft, is creating strong impressions on visitors to their southern counterpart.

Camille Serisier presents a quirky juxtaposition of the natural environment with human manufactured materials titled: My Big Baby Bear. The images of a large grizzly-bear as well as forestry and wilderness are stylistically hand-drawn on visibly ‘man-made’ torn paper and cardboard. The artist’s sentiment is neither sinister nor passive, but a sophisticated work of calm ambiguity. Playful in its presentation, the work of Serisier immediately engages its viewers with its undeniably appealing aesthetic, and then furthermore propagates a mood of curiosity and perhaps empathy towards the artist’s character of the 'Big Baby Bear'. One can’t help but be reminded of current impending environmental concerns.

Sean Rafferty’s Projection Standee Manual Instruction is a crafty play on functionality and the artistic process. With a series of white cardboard box constructions all hung to tactfully resemble the artist’s canvas, Rafferty neatly cuts into, illustrates onto, and arranges his meticulous forms in order to instruct his audiences regarding the construction of a viewing booth intended for video art projections. It is however art about art; and although meditated, considered and executed in a manner that is both thoughtful and sophisticated, any hope within the viewer of an explosion of meaning will inevitably be countered by the actuality of an implosion of self-indulgence. Rafferty’s work is an intrinsic reminder of art’s self-destructive counter-productivity in the event of becoming too engaged with its own methods of practice.

Contributing to the disparate array of themes within Firstdraft’s offering to Melbourne audiences, the black and white photographic work of Penelope Benton is almost neo-feminist in its treatment of the male-gaze. Entitled Mini Mechanics, the work consists of three digital prints, stylised in a black and white aesthetic that draws to mind burlesque vaudeville. In each photograph are leather-clad sexualised women posing amongst an old fashioned automobile in a mechanic’s garage. Indeed a vocal critique of masculine iconography and its derogatory assumptions of women.

While the Making Space festival presents the work of emerging artists already quite familiar in Victorian spaces, Bus have proved themselves a hot-spot with the inclusion of interstate artists making a mark in other Australian capital cities. Raise High The Roofbeams is a commendable effort, brought to Melbourne by one of Sydney’s most well established artist-run initiatives, indeed refreshing in a scene that too often can seem congested by its own cultural introversion.