A Group Show curated by Stephen Spurrier and Kyle Jenkins exploring the intersections between abstraction and representation including artists Victoria Munro, Arvid Boecker, Brent Hallard, Karri McPherson, Katie Wagner, Tiffany Shafran, Tarn McLean, Kyle Jenkins, Stephen Spurrier, Chasley Wilson, Brodie Taylor, Ursula De Kretser, Ute Braatz, Cahterine Parker.
TRANFER, TRANSPOSE, TRANSPLANT, TRANSPIRE, TRANSPARENT, TRANSMITT, TRANSITIVE, TRANSLUCENT, TRANSITION, TRANSFIGURE, TRANSFORM, TRANS:
RAYGUN projects, July 2017
Within a world of shifting consequences where an image, a moment, an experience, a concept is both held within its juncture of inception but consequently consumed by the layering of collapsed multi- communal, national and global positioning, the artists invited to participate in this exhibition are positioned within a theoretical and aesthetic engagement with TRANS. TRANS in this exhibition is both a theoretical and visual descriptor that both governs the artist’s work e.g. the materiality of paint as ‘transparent’, a narrative that visually ‘transpires’ through a compositional discourse, an artwork being made transforming from material into object , deconstructed and then ‘transferred’ into something else, moving from one medium to another within a practice that is constantly transitive in visual outcomes but rigorous and permanent in conceptual intention etc. Collectively, individually and through a shared connectivity the artists in the exhibition deal with various ideas of TRANS: and how a work is both set within a moment of permanence, born out of the studio, released into the world and fixed within that visual moment of being. However like the word ‘trans’ and the many variations that come from its linguistic beginnings, these artists through their work look to leap off from similar traditional beginnings (origins) of painting, sculpture, printmaking and drawing and to move beyond, traversing their own creative histories as they intuitively look to produce something new in their artistic outputs.
Nothing is ever made up of one thing, but instead a multitude of transformative fragments that come together, collapse into a moment of artistic production and then break apart to be conceptually reassigned new meaning when the next work comes along to be created. In many ways the exciting part of making a work of art is that as the work is conceived, developed, built and constructed, in this studio moment, it is a success. However once the work is finished, what transpires is the fact the work is a conceptual success and a visual failure all at once. It may align itself with its intentions but it can’t say everything about an artist ‘as evolving thinker’ visually. That’s why artists make another artwork, and another, and another so forth. It’s the same reason why museum curatorial practices collect multiple works from the same artist attempting to bridge the life of their career collapsing space into a transitive experience within the one or two spaces within the museum housing the retrospective collection.
Artists don’t think within the singular and to many there is no finality because they keep searching for an answer to a problem that can never be found, because they themselves ‘as an artist’ is the problem. For every artwork made there is another one to begin that may get them closer to an answer or a point of closure. But is there really any answer? Any closure? It is precisely at this point that this exhibition brings together this group of artists to offer, within the singular exhibition space of Raygun projects, their personalised intentions in terms of their own practices. Some may be linked through exhibiting previously, undertaking collaborations, however on the whole the exhibition is a survey of artists whose practices engage in TRANS, if not knowingly then through the history of the works they have produced and intuitive decisions they have made within their individual practices.
RAYGUN 