Unwish | Spinning Tops | Infra-ultra

Gallery 1 & 2 – Unwish | Dara Gill

In his newest body of work, Gill continues his exploration into the state of anxiety through photography, video and sculpture. Referencing a broad range of thinkers on the topic, Gill stitches together a definition of anxiety that becomes a critical framework for the creation of his pieces. Through processes of surveying, he engages members of the public through situational based research where a subject responds to an ‘experiment’ and subsequent detritus and/or documentation becomes the exhibited/art object. Unwish, a reference to Ernest Bloch’s book The Principles of Hope, seeks to explore the anxiety in hoping for a particular situation—and its antithesis—the anxiety of hoping for anything but a particular situation.

This project has been assisted by the Australian Government through the Australia Council, its arts funding and advisory body.

Gallery 3 – Spinning Tops: Greg Hodge

Spinning Tops is a new body of work investigating the junction between an abstract painting and a representational image. These works range from the quiet and meditative to the playful and lighthearted. Constructed through the placement and composition of interlocking shapes and motifs, the work aims to set up both a relationship and tension between an imagined illusionistic space and a representational image. Whilst the spaces that are created and the forms that develop out of the painting process are invented, the repeated overlay and expansion and often stacking of motifs relate to architecture and landscape. This building of forms and their positioning within a painted atmospheric space invite the viewer to seek a recognisable or tangible image within the work.

Gallery 4 – Infra-ultra: Paul Greedy

A trope of aesthetic theory applied to our experience of the natural world; the Sublime defines that which is vast and/or complex beyond comprehension. While Kant describes this quality in terms of a tension between imagination and logic, Lyotard sees such tensions as demonstrating the limits of the mind’s capacity to organise the world rationally. Similarly, Hans Gumbrecht argues that metaphysics is inadequate for defining the aesthetic dimension of human experience, as such encounters rely largely on ‘presence’ or an embodied sense of ‘being in sync with the world’. Reflecting on this notion of the sublime as limit or threshold, Infra-ultra explores the aesthetics of ineffable nature by examining what affects us beyond the scope of sensory perception. By drawing on the psychic potential of sub audible sound placed within the context of a turbulent atmosphere, the work not only seeks to evoke affect within the viewer but a sense of the intense presence which punctuates our encounters with nature.