September 23–November 20, 2022
Paul Yore: WORD MADE FLESH, an extensive survey show featuring the complete range of the artist’s output, including appliquéd quilts and needlework, banners and pendants, collage and assemblage, and a sizable mixed media installation, is proudly presented by ACCA. The exhibition, which continues ACCA’s modern Australian solo series, is designed as a gesamtkunstwerk to the fullest extent possible, showcasing pieces created over the past 15 years in addition to a substantial new room-scaled sculpture installation created specifically for it.
One of Australia’s most influential and thought-provoking multidisciplinary artists is Paul Yore. He was raised on Gunaikurnai Country in Gippsland, Victoria, and was born in Naarm/Melbourne in 1987. In 2010, he finished his studies at Monash University in painting, archaeology, and anthropology. In her work, Yore engages with the histories of religious art and ritual, queer identity, pop culture, and neo-liberal capitalism. She transforms a wide range of found images, objects, and texts into sexually and politically charged tableaux and assemblages that celebrate hybrid and fluid identities, ambiguous and contradictory meanings, and the glimmering horizon of queer worldmaking.
Paul Yore: Word Made Flesh is organized around five specifically created rooms called Signs, Embodiment, Manifesto, Horizon, and Word Made Flesh, each of which presents distinct bodies of work and discursive contexts. This itinerary outlines two major trajectories in the artist’s practice: the first traces the growth of Yore’s textile practice, from small embroidered pieces to large appliquéd quilts that, among other things, reference gay porn, cartoons, psychedelia, narrative and historical paintings, as well as the decorative semantic excesses of rococo style and Flemish and French tapestries. A brand-new kaleidoscopic, architecturally-scaled work that is anarchically made up of improvised temporary structures, mixed-media sculpture and found materials, collage and assemblage, painting, film, music, and light represents the second trajectory. This interactive installation envisions a queer alternate reality that has emerged from the Anthropocene wasteland and has been performatively integrated into the depraved spectacle of hyper-capitalist civilization.
A significant monographic book, published by Art Ink in collaboration with the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, will be released concurrently with the ACCA exhibition. The publication includes texts and essays by eminent Australian and international artists, scholars, and commentators on its more than 400 pages of images and newly commissioned writing, including Tony Albert, Hannah Baer, Mikala Dwyer, Daniel Fountain, Helen Hughes, Bruce LaBruce, and an extensive interview with Paul Yore by Max Delany.
Curators: Max Delany, in collaboration with Devon Ackermann and Paul Yore.
Paul Yore in conversation with Nick Henderson, Saturday, October 1, 5pm
Paul Yore will be in conversation with Nick Henderson, volunteer committee member at the Australian Queer Archives, and Curator at the National Film and Sound Archive of Australia. For further information visit accca.melbourne.
Australian Centre for Contemporary Art (ACCA)
111 Sturt Street, Southbank
Melbourne VIC 3006
Australia