WHEN : 3rd August — 14th September
WHERE : Pestorius Sweeney House 39 Eblin Drive, Hamilton,Brisbane
David Pestorius is pleased to present an exhibition of new work by Sydney artist Gary Warner (*1957). In the late 1970s, Warner was a central figure in Brisbane’s vital post-punk and avant-garde art scenes. At the time, he lived a kind of ‘art-life’ touched by the provocations of Dada, the Situationists, and, of course, Punk. However, unlike in New York and London, where Punk soon became confused with fashion and evolved into an academic musical genre, in Brisbane it was an act of resistance against a repressive State government and an ultra-conservative society with its retrograde art and culture. Warner’s early work, much of it collaborative, was the product of this grim situation. Functioning outside the institutionalised frameworks of official art (eg. galleries, museums, and contemporary art spaces), it took many forms, including mail art, ‘zines, record covers, artist pages, Polaroid photography, Super 8 film, and elaborate conceptually themed environments for performances by the important Brisbane post-punk group Zero.
Significant within the scope of Warner’s early work was an experimental music project known as Forced Audience. Inspired by the Cagean notion of “all sound is music”, Forced Audience was briefly affiliated with John Nixon’s Anti-Music, while in late 1981 it was included on a sampler released by the important English cassette magazine Audio Arts. Sound has continued to be an important locus within Warner’s creative practice and for his latest exhibition he will present ‘WoodWorked + SoundShell’, an hour-long soundscape meditation on the forest origins of timber and the work of making objects with wood. Derived from Warner’s library of field recordings, the soundscape is contained within, and emanates from, a small laser-cut plywood geodesic dome designed by the artist. A site-specific wall drawing, which incorporates custom-designed hub elements developed by the artist for construction of larger timber geodesic domes, will accompany the soundscape.
