Install view: Felix Kalmenson.
Gallery 1 As part of the Perth International Arts Festival, Success presents No Confidence, an international survey of new audio-visual art examining today’s political culture.
Gallery 2 Melbourne artist Emma Hamilton appears in At the Equinox, her first West-coast solo show, producing a series of sculptural photographic works considering the interrelation of time, perception, and landscape.
Gallery 3 Wilderness Tasks, a new selected exhibition examining contemporary artists alternatively romantic and adversarial relationship with the natural environment.
Gallery 4 A curated performance program with a night of live music from Josten Myburgh Octet, Petros Vouris, Hysperia (Mei Saraswati), DJ Tourist Kid, as well as a site-specific audio-visual installation from Chris Cobilis.
Institute for New Feeling (USA) — Felix Kalmenson (Russia-Canada) — Jennifer Moon (USA) — Yuri Pattison (Ireland) — Julika Rudelius (Germany) — Stefanos Tsivopoulos (Greece)
Part of the 2016 Perth International Arts Festival, Visual Arts programme.
No Confidence is an exhibition about our contemporary political situation. Artists in this show express an unease with the state of our liberal democratic society. They consider its various inadequacies, failures and challenges, and together, create an image of a dystopian political present.
In No Confidence, our era is characterised by an inability to see a way forward politically, an inability to constructively challenge predominant conditions, or to find new solutions. The works of the international artists in No Confidence express themes of defeat, exhaustion, and isolation, and depicts contemporary political situations as vacant, frozen, or hollow. Some artworks cloak their perspectives in ambiguity, and others protect themselves through irony. All are conscious of their inability to provide concrete solutions, answers, and alternatives to the political problems they depict.
Presented in early 2016, the exhibition prefigured the political turmoil that was to emerge over that year, including Brexit and the Trump presidency. Curated by Guy Louden and Dale Buckley.
Melbourne-based artist Emma Hamilton appears in her first west-coast solo show, presenting a series of sculptural and photographic works considering the interrelation of time, perception, and landscape.
Hamilton travelled to a remote northern Norwegian island, into a zone divided by the line of the Arctic Circle. The Arctic Circle is a border line defined by our perception of the sun. While depicted definitively on a map, on the ground this line becomes uncertain. Even so, it forms the fleeting tipping point between the extremes of light and dark of the summer and winter solstices. In At the Equinox, the artist attempts to configure a line across the landscape by ‘trapping’ a precarious space between a camera and its reflection in a mirror.
At Success, Hamilton presents an experimental series of sculpture and photography that explores this perceptual border, as well as the border zone distinguishing the material from the image.
Fernando Sanchez Castillo (Spain) — Jess Day (Aus) — Todd McMillan (Aus) — Alex Monteith (New Zealand) — Andrew and David Wood (Aus)
Wilderness Tasks is an exhibition exploring the tradition of landscape. The international and Australian artists in Wilderness Tasks traverse deserts, seas, and mountains in order to critique archetypal representations of landscape in art history and in modern culture.
Our relationship with the landscape is highly mediated - distorted through representation, be it via a painting, a lens, the windscreen, or the monitor. This process often renders it romanticised, idealised, diminished, or flattened. Wilderness Tasks explores this situation, setting traditional concepts against the modern notions of personal freedom, artistic expression, and political action.
Curated by Emma Buswell, Wilderness Tasks presents non-narrative video, sculpture, and performative artwork attempting to find a new middle ground.
Josten Myburgh — Petros Vouris — Hysperia — Tourist Kid (DJ Set)
Presenting sounds from the diverse worlds of experimental composition, dance music, free jazz, pop and beyond, Success’ live music program commences with a unique and boldly varied line-up.
In the dedicated Gallery Four performance space, curator Lyndon Blue presents the premiere of Josten Myburgh’s latest piece octet (breaking waves), an exploration of the politics of collaboration; live music from Petros Vouris; Hysperia (Mei Saraswati plus new band), and DJ Tourist Kid.
Gallery Four will also feature new work by Perth-based composer, musician and artist Chris Cobilis. Is This You (2016) is a new experimental audio-visual installation based on the artist’s compositional processes. Cobilis will construct a conceptual feedback loop involving the lens, a broadcast system, biological ocularcentrism and the Sun. Referencing the birth of user-generated content, the work traces the 25-year history of the TV programme Funniest Home Videos and the interrelation of expression and vanity. Is This You will continue throughout Success’ inaugural exhibition period.
