The Politics of Snails
Sarah Aiken | Tay Haggarty | Phoebe Kelly | David M Thomas
18 November 2023 - 10 December 2023
EXHIBITION TEXT - by Madeline Brewer
THE LETTERS - THE POLITICS OF SNAILS
A copy of the letters in newspaper format is available to order and will be posted to you. Please email in.artistruninitiative@gmail.com for details.
The Politics of Snails is a group project curated by IN | ARI with works that speak to connection, collaboration, and/or challenge the idea of singular authorship. The artists in this exhibition merge and combine methods of making and practice that question social engagement, community, and process by way of sculpture, painting, sound, video, and movement practice. Together, the artists have become pen pals. Here, they have written a chain of letters where the ‘snail’ has become a central motif and conceptual marker to consider modes of engagement. Individually, their works carve out different forms of relationships and associations working with personal networks and broader communities.
Sarah Aiken explores the body as an assemblage and unexpected relations by collaging movement with video, the corporeal and the digital. Tay Haggarty proposes sculpture as a catalyst for connection, talking to queerness and allyship. Phoebe Kelly’s glass tiles are an act of collaboration and reciprocity, making physical memories of gestures in a community-centred studio process. David M Thomas has a long history of working collaboratively, posing ways to consider social connectivity and disrupting the primacy of singular authorship.
OPENING EVENT | 18 November 3 - 5pm
‘Slowness that feels _____’, opening performance @ 3pm (Run Time 10 min)
Join us for a performance on opening night by Tay Haggarty and Jake Aitchison titled ‘A slowness that feels _____’. The performance come install will activate sculptural objects in the exhibition and explore slowness, queer role models, embodied movement as a form of care.
Soft Spot To Rest_Tay Haggarty_Image by Joe Ruckli
Performers: Jake Aitchison @jakeaitchison and Tay Haggarty @tay_haggarty
ARTISTS
SARAH AIKEN | @snaiken
Sarah Aiken is an artist and choreographer from Bellingen NSW, working and living on Wurundjeri land in Melbourne. Her work investigates assemblage, authorship, scale and the self, looking at the roles of audience, performer, subject and object and connecting tangibly with audiences, to consider performance as a site for empathy & exchange.
TAY HAGGARTY | @tay_haggarty
Tay Haggarty’s practice explores how reductive forms can be used as an open field to reflect upon personal and shared experience. These investigations take the form of collaborations, performances, videos, sculpture and public art. Haggarty uses industrial and ready-made materials in arrangements that are often minimal and site specific.
PHOEBE KELLY | @phoebejkelly
Phoebe Kelly is a visual artist and photographer living and working in Naarm. Through photography and sculpture, she explores the potential to translate the intangible into the physical, considering the various ways in which memory and time might be documented or captured through material forms. She works with various casting methods in glass, wax and bronze, as well as engaging in analogue photographic processes across her practice.
DAVID M THOMAS | @thomasdavidmichael
David M Thomas’s multi form practice is a project one could describe as 'demonstrative cultural criticism’. He does this by preserving the makeshift whilst courting the role of amateur; an attitude as much a mobile material philosophy as do it yourself ethos. A significant enduring mood for Thomas is deadpan humour that masks an often entertaining visual strategy, including consideration for personal text, biography and acquired objects. This artful dance is like a destabilised proposition for undermining the purely speculative value of fine art contexts and objects . Audio and photographic documentation processes have also played a central role, across Thomas’s 30 year career and parallel practices. His ongoing theoretical and practical interest also demonstrate how archives function for artists (and historians) in valuing determining and communicating the historical development, persistence and movement of philosophical and political thought.
WORKSHOP | Ceramic Makers Workshop #3 with David M Thomas
WHEN: 9 December 11-1pm
TICKETS: HERE
WHERE: The Old Lock Up, 4 First Avenue Maroochydore
In this 2 hour workshop you will be introduced to various techniques for working with clay including hand building, working with slabs and building with coils.
The focus for this “hands on” workshop asks how can traditional methods of working with clay and ceramic be configured for contemporary sculptural practices?
Clay and tools provided.
We look forward to seeing you there!
ABOUT THE ARTIST
DAVID M THOMAS | @thomasdavidmichael
David M Thomas’s multi form practice is a project one could describe as 'demonstrative cultural criticism’. He does this by preserving the makeshift whilst courting the role of amateur; an attitude as much a mobile material philosophy as do it yourself ethos. A significant enduring mood for Thomas is deadpan humour that masks an often entertaining visual strategy, including consideration for personal text, biography and acquired objects. This artful dance is like a destabilised proposition for undermining the purely speculative value of fine art contexts and objects . Audio and photographic documentation processes have also played a central role, across Thomas’s 30 year career and parallel practices. His ongoing theoretical and practical interest also demonstrate how archives function for artists (and historians) in valuing determining and communicating the historical development, persistence and movement of philosophical and political thought.
Thomas’s practice began in Sydney in the early 1990’s as artist and instigator of the legendary CBD Gallery and for 20 years has lived and worked in Wynnum, Brisbane. Across 3 decades Thomas has activated multiple modes of research, performance, making, exhibition and performance. Recent notable outcomes include the installation Sub Urban Mystic at Outer Space CAS Brisbane 2022. In 2021 he undertook a 3 month residency developing the project Resonant Forms, at Sculptors Queensland. In 2020, Thomas produced the installation, Mater Matter for Stable Brisbane. Other significant exhibitions are Simple Math at Knulp (Sydney), Real Distraction, at Wreckers Art Space and inclusion in GOMA Q, a survey of Contemporary QLD practitioners. Thomas under the stage name David Ethix has collaborated with Brisbane sub-tropical goths ∑GG√EIN since 2011, founded with artist Archie Moore, ∑√ resists musical genre and philosophical dichotomies and thus absorbs and redirects musical cues from across a spectrum of shared and overlapping and contradictory musical experiences. Recent performances include Opening event, Yuriyal Eric Bridgeman + Haus Yuriyal Arebaa / Sun and Moon, Milani Gallery, Essential Tremors Festival, (∑GG√EIN) Pheonix Central Park, Sydney double bill with Claire Cooper. Making Art Work, IMA Brisbane 2020. Certain Realities, Closing Performance Murray Art Museum, 2019. Thomas also composes and produces music for live performance, as he did for Justene Williams, She Predicted the Weather, Sydney Contemporary, Live Performance Section, Carriage Works 2022.
IMAGE: David M Thomas, Monument Maquette for My Mother no 1, 2023 Glazed Ceramic 40x40x15cm. Images courtesy of the artist.
ACKNOWLEDGMENT
This initiative is supported through the Creative Industries Investment Program (CIIP) and is jointly funded by ArtsCoast through Sunshine Coast Council’s Arts and Heritage Levy and the Regional Arts Development Fund (RADF) in partnership with the Queensland Government.
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