Install view: PASSING / PARADES.
Gallery 1 PASSING / PARADES explores modalities of queer visibility in the work of contemporary visual artists from across the country. We’re here, we’re queer, and we’d like to say hello.
Gallery 2 Success presents A glossary of sorts, an abbreviated retrospective of works in the innovative and intellectually driven practice of Sydney-based contemporary artist Benjamin Forster.
Gallery 3 Inanition, a curated exhibition of video and sculptural art imagining the end of times. Art and Sci-Fi combine in the speculative visions of prominent international and Western Australian artists.
Gallery 4 The Success Sounds series of performance continues with a night of live music featuring germ_lock, Gerygone, Feels, and Stina.
Gallery 5 Breathing Status, an exhibition exploring intimate and precarious relationships with personal technology and homewares by Tully Arnot and Bronte Jones.
Frances Barrett — Justin Shoulder & Bhenji Ra — Hissy Fit — Claudia Nicholson — Elliott Bryce Foulkes — Torrie Torrie — Liam Colgan — Anna Dunnill — Anna McMahon — Salote Tawale
PASSING / PARADES is a collective exhibition that explores modalities of visibility in relation to queer bodies, queer spaces and queer communities. It is curated by Kate Britton.
Hidden and invisible queerness; costumes; disguises; tattoos; yellow socks; codes; passing (as straight); #orlando; queer spaces; flagging; turning; clubbing; vogueing; queer bodies in public spaces; Stonewall; Bowie; coming out vs. the closet; cruising; butch or femme; top or bottom; Prince; Pilari; queer languages; poppers; transgressive sexualities; bears and twinks; queer families; ACT-UP; allies; archives; assholes; Mardi Gras; pussy; parades and parties; riots and activism; gays bash back; #twomenkissing; slogans, badges, icons; Safe Schools; bois and gurls; pink dollars; pink-washing; pink bubble; inclusion, exclusion – PASSING / PARADES concerns itself with myriad forms and experiences of visibility for queers of all kinds.
A glossary of sorts is the first retrospective of Sydney-based contemporary artist Benjamin Forster.
It presents a selection of Forster’s lesser known works made over the past 10 years. As an artist ever occupied with the elusive location of “meaning” and the expressive failures of language, this exhibition brings together residue from his reoccurring interest in books and the written word. The selected works, varying from open-source software and algorithmic videos to artist books and handmade paper, reveal a relentless enquiry into the social production of knowledge and the artist’s growing antagonism towards its privatisation.
Benjamin Forster is not . ( Primavera, MCA, 12 ) sure . ( NEW13, ACCA, 13 ) ( co- founder, Frontyard, 16 ) was ( Reading, De Appel + Stedelijk, 15 ) perhaps. ( co- editing with rc, un magazine, 14 ) o they are . ( , , Firstdraft, 13 ) ACT, WA, NSW based . ( Bachelor of Visual Arts Honours, ANU, 08 ) or ( Kynic, CCAS, 13 ) co. she will . ( Residencies: MCA 13, SymbioticA 09, PICA 09, CIA 12-13, FAC 11, Helsinki 14, ARTSPACE 16, etc ) no. he assures you. (Technologism, MUMA, 15) you may ( My Brain Is in My Inkstand, Cranbrook Art Museum, USA, 13 ) be unsure. ( Deshaciendo texto, La Casa Encendida, Madrid, 16 ) of acronym . of number .
Patrick Bernatchez — Claire Evans & K. Michael Merrell — Kelly Richardson — Erin Coates — Thea Constantino — Joshua Webb
Inanition: a Speculation on the End of Times is an exhibition as cautionary tale; a staging of the epic cultural anxieties and troubling realities of our era and an imagining of the potential future for humanity, or, the ‘end of times’.
New works by established WA artists Thea Constantino, Joshua Webb and Erin Coates are shown alongside works of accomplished international artists, Kelly Richardson (Canada), Patrick Bernatchez (Canada) and Claire Evans and K. M. Merrell (USA).
Together these works form a dialogue about humanity in the face of the Anthropocene – the sixth largest extinction. They generate an apocalyptic aesthetic through the suggestion as much as the representation of global environmental collapse, existential crisis and the desire for escape.
Inanition: a Speculation on the End of Times is curated by Laetitia Wilson.
germ_lock — Gerygone — Feels — Stina
Melbourne duo germ_lock (featuring noted installation artist Eric Demetriou) reappraises the sounds we call “noise” to create irreverent, highly charged performances.
New local duo Feels, comprising musicians Elise Reitze and Rosie Taylor, folds live mallet percussion and other acoustic tones into the bright, starkly hued sound-environment of electronic house music.
Genre-defying collective Gerygone, headed by Peruvian-Australian composer Eduardo Cossio, combines brass, guitar, drums and abstract electronics to create rich and impressionistic orchestrations across surprising structures.
Finally, classically-trained, experimentally minded and much-loved Perth musician Stina Thomas returns to the stage with her always mesmerising, organ- driven ambient melodics and intricate musique concrete.
In Breathing Status, Tully Arnot and Bronte Jones explore intimate and precarious relationships with personal technology and homewares.
When an Apple MacBook sleeps, an LED light pulses on and off at the typical speed a resting adult breathes. The rhythm, patented by Apple in 2002, is intended to calm the product’s user, suggesting a reciprocal relationship between owner and object. Breathing Status is a collection of sculptures by Arnot and Jones that draw from and exaggerate this relationship. The objects are anxious and needy, constricted and latently violent.
Occupying several small rooms within Success, Breathing Status explores how idle danger and desire can become embodied within household objects.
