Install view: Plugger.
Gallery 1 Success presents Bye, a series of new sculptural artworks that double as a playable 18 hole mini-golf course.
Gallery 2 The Nineteenth Hole acts as the conceptual clubhouse for Gallery One’s Bye. It’s an exhibition on futile labour, and the ways in which this labour is aestheticised – through romantic false-positivity, hyperreality, and pop nihilism.
Gallery 3 Plugger, a curated exhibition of art exploring the relationship between sport and art through the work of prominent international and Australian artists.
Gallery 4 Poets of the Machine, Mathas and Mates, Roslyn Helper, and Bullet Train 4 Australia.
Gallery 5 One Million Views, Sydney-based video artist Tiyan Baker examines the emotional transaction between YouTubers and their fans by exploring themes of yearning and intimacy in the digital age.
Success presents Bye, a series of new sculptural artworks that double as a playable 18 hole mini-golf course.
Produced collaboratively by the artists behind the Success gallery and programme, Bye appears across the cavernous main gallery space, with each mini golf course acting as an interactive and comprehensible artwork.
In Bye, mini golf becomes subject and metaphor: alternatively as typifying corporate elitism, environmental waste, cult fashion and aesthetics, and late-capitalist decadence. The project parodies the notion of use-value in art, questions the quality of audience participation, and the culture of the contemporary ‘installation art’ experience.
In golf, the ‘nineteenth hole’ is the clubhouse, where players drink and socialise post-game. In mini golf, the nineteenth hole is part of the course, a difficult par one with a big payoff. Players scoring a hole-in-one are rewarded with a free round, an opportunity to return to the beginning of the course and play again. Hard work is its own reward, and the prize for mini golf is more mini golf.
At Success (where the golf is always free), The Nineteenth Hole acts as the conceptual clubhouse for Gallery One’s Bye. It’s an exhibition on futile labour, and the ways in which this labour is aestheticised – through romantic false- positivity, hyperreality, and pop nihilism.
It’s a place to relax, and a space to drink. Lord knows you’ve earned it.
David Attwood (AU) — Bas Schevers (NL) — Stef Van den Dungen (NL) — Gabrielle de Vietri (AU) — Guillermo Kramer (AU)
Plugger is an exhibition of local and international artists exploring the politics of sport. Drawing on the near universal fascination with populist sporting culture and competitive aggression, this show explores the personal and formal relationships between art and sport
This exhibition examines the ways in which artists adopt methodologies and strict frameworks from the world of sport in the creation of new artwork. Art construction burrows from the arenas of the everyday and sporting contexts, game strategy, play, camaraderie, and the gamesmanship aesthetic.
Interested in examining the intersection of contemporary art history, populist sport and rule making, Plugger unpicks the frisson through which both these subjects are made separate. Through humour and appropriation each artist grapples with binary oppositions, adversarial relationships, the pursuit for success, and the personal politics of winning and losing./p>
Plugger is curated by Emma Buswell.
Poets of the Machine — Mathas and Mates — Roslyn Helper — Bullet Train 4 Australia
In the dedicated Gallery Four performance space, curator Lyndon Blue presents the fifth in the Success Sounds series, bringing together diverse approaches to instrumentation, rhythm and text.
Koral Island and Stripe are Poets of the Machine, a spoken-word, music and experimental performance duo who have been working together since 1988 in the UK and Europe, Australia and New Zealand.
Inspired by the ethos of Dada, lo-fi dance music and the interface of performance and technology, Poets of the Machine have honed a unique approach that lies between established disciplines. Recently featured on Efficient Space’s ‘Midnite Spares’ compilation (curated by András and Instant Peterson), Success Sounds 5 represents a rare return to the live stage for this singular duo.
Mathas and Mates brings together Tom Mathieson’s vivid, politically-charged street poetry with live accompaniment from Jerome Turle (drums), Phil Waldron (double bass) and Michelle Smith (harp). The seldom-seen collaboration promises a striking blend of potent imagery, intense lyrical delivery and engrossing orchestration.
Collapsing interests in freely evolving musical structures, live trombone sound processing, the mutable concept of “groove,” and public transport, Bullet Train 4 Australia is the strange and compelling new collaborative project of Sam Newman and Ben Aguero.
Success Sounds 5 will also feature of special performance by Sydney-based artist Roslyn Helper, presenting a new iteration of her work ‘Your Beautiful Life’ - a futuristic vision of curating one’s selfhood, facilitated by a queer cyborg choir.
One Million Views examines the emotional transaction between YouTubers and their fans by exploring themes of yearning and intimacy in the age of YouTube.
What is driving the emotional transaction between YouTubers and their fans? Isit the evocation of an imagined version of ourselves? Or the idea of an unsullied connection, a perfect audience who will see us exactly as we want to be seen?
By taking portraits of the YouTuber and their fan in their daily lives, artist Tiyan Baker attempts to lay bare their relationship in its physical, tangible form, to explore what it means to be present, yet also absent.
