Speculative poetry and material innovation are being promoted by project8, a new contemporary art gallery in Melbourne, through exhibitions and accompanying events.
The second show by project8 explores the shared human impulse to physically engrave place into space using the colloquial name for a dwelling, “digs.”
DIGS, an exhibition organized by Cūrā8 (Kim Donaldson and Sean Lowry) and including the work of five artists (Laura Cuch, Spencer Harrison, Jaime Powell, Tariku Shiferaw, and Lisa Waup), ponders the role that material expression and spatial configuration have in the creation of individual homes.
The curatorial idea behind DIGS is to investigate how architectural interventions, décor, keepsakes, and placeholders might temporarily and materially turn spaces into places. Artists also creatively choose, organize, and manipulate things selected from the continuum of lived experience to create experiences of place that are distinct from everything else in the world, echoing the general human need to create a sense of home.
The artists featured in DIGS use a variety of media, including printmaking, video, drawing, painting, animation, sculpture, and sculptural installation, to examine the materiality of placemaking, while also incorporating elements of their diverse cultural and social origins. How do we identify the locations where we eat and sleep? And how do we create a sense of home by “making do” with the resources at our disposal?
Laura Cuch is a visual artist, researcher, and cultural geographer who was born in Barcelona and now resides in London. She uses photography, film, and installation. Her practice-related PhD in Geography at UCL examined the connection between food, spirituality, and common religious activities in West London neighborhoods.
The visual art of Spencer Harrison distills color, form, and space into well-organized abstract constructions that speak to our everyday urban experience. He references design, architecture, science, and the built environment in his visual language, which is influenced by the world around us.
Using lithography and mark-making, Australian-Indian artist Jaime Powell explores what the mind does as the body transcends into space. The core of Jaime’s work is the investigation of belonging.
Artist Tariku Shiferaw, based in New York, investigates mark-making in relation to the material and immaterial spaces of painting and social systems. Shiferaw views the process of leaving a physical imprint as a performative proclamation of his being that simultaneously introduces new concepts and boundaries while inexorably changing the immediate physical space.
Lisa Waup, a multidisciplinary First Peoples artist of diverse cultures, was born in Naarm (Melbourne). Waup’s work encompasses a variety of media, including digital art, weaving, printmaking, photography, sculpture, and fashion.
Cūrā8 is a curatorial collaboration that Kim Donaldson and Sean Lowry developed specifically for project8. Cūrā8 is dedicated to advancing aesthetic themes like poetic and material innovation in contemporary art and curatorship by working in a dynamic and mutually responsive interaction between the roles of artist, curator, producer, and theorist. Donaldson and Lowry, prominent artist academics and program directors at the Victorian College of the Arts, University of Melbourne, have been active on a national and international level for more than three decades. Donaldson and Lowry have teamed up as Cūrā8 to foster fresh artistic and curatorial collaborations between regional and global artworlds and research cultures after individually developing and testing their ideas in a variety of artistic, academic, curatorial, and professional situations.
The Wurundjeri people of the Kulin Nation are recognized by project8 as the legitimate owners of the land on which we operate. We extend a warm welcome to guests who have preserved their culture and country for millennia. We pay our respects to all members of First Nations, including living and deceased ancestors and elders.
Project8
Wurundjeri Country
Level 2, 417 Collins Street
Melbourne Victoria 3000
Australia
project8.gallery
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