From Stella Rosa McDonald…
Assemblage II is an exhibition joined together by the holes of missing parts. In it twelve artists respond to materials left over from last year’s Underbelly Arts Lab. Along with an obscure and fluid set of parameters belonging to ‘the rules of assemblage’ these cast-offs were offered as the stimulus for a different set of artists to create something new from the discarded scraps of old ideas.
It’s not clear if the rules of assemblage—obliquely defined by the curators as material, ellipse, grid and non-linear—are invented parameters or real formal strategies but it is clear that limitations like these give way to innovation. Astrid Lorange and Amelia Groom, both writers, take the opportunity to handle language in new ways making it crisscross and loop as they respectively employ the grid and the ellipsis in their responses to materials. Where Lorange’s work is a study in the creativity inherent in restraint, Rosie Deacon’s installation indulges in an excess of materiality, appearing to blush with the strain. Tully Arnot’s mechanised sculpture gives the illusion of a flower peering gingerly from a section of pavement, as if to summarise the notion that all latent things have the potential for new life.
Until August 31st
107 Projects, Redfern
Pic credit: Tully Arnot, Untitled, 2014, flooring, plaster, artificial flower, servomotor, microcontroller. Image Courtesy of the artist.
