Gallery One:
‘Body to Bodies’
Curated by Anna May Kirk
To open one’s self up to more-than-human relationships is the first requirement of collaborative survival in precarious times. ‘Body to Bodies’ is a mosaic of multispecies worldings. A speculative ecosystem of interrelations that exists in the porosity between inside and outside the body. Here, agents leak and mutate, exchange and collaborate, affect and are affected. Their umwelt a world unto itself, yet intrinsically at stake with each other – forming a dynamic networked landscape where to be one is always to become with many. ‘Body to Bodies’ engages care as a strategy for living and thinking in this more-than-human assemblage, emphasising relationality as a framework that places us at stake with the world.
Featuring works by Hannah Hallam-Eames, Ivey Wawn, Lachlan Herd, Lucien Alperstein, Lukiah, Nadège Philippe-Janon, Pony Express, Rhiannon Newton and Sofiyah Ruqayah.
Gallery One B:
‘An Incomplete Register’
Ashley Perry
‘An Incomplete Register’ examines the impact of settler colonialism on institutional records. Ashley Perry draws on several collection databases and external sources to reveal inconsistencies, producing quasi artefacts and fictitious records that operate in a speculative space wherein Indigenous authorship is reclaimed, and fragments of stories and objects from across time are merged. Each of the works in this exhibition are derived from stories and objects of the Yoolooburrabee (Quandamooka People), and challenge discrepancies and omissions within colonial institutional archives.
Ashley Perry is an interdisciplinary Goenpul artist from Quandamooka country. He is Interested in decolonising theories as a way of understanding materials, histories, and artistic practice and examining knowledge structures and methods around collections. Perry works across sculpture, drawing, printmaking and new media utilising a wide variety of materials, from traditional processes such as copperplate etching to more contemporary such as .html programming. He completed a Bachelor of Fine Art in Sculpture and Spatial Practice with honours at the Victorian College of the Arts. Perry has exhibited in galleries across Melbourne including Margaret Lawrence Gallery, West Space, Incinerator Gallery and the McClelland Gallery & Sculpture Park. He recently presented work in Florence, Italy for the First Commissions Project, the University of Melbourne. He was the recipient of the Mary and Lou Senini Prize in sculpture (2017) and the Fiona Myer Award (2017). in the In 2017 Ashley was awarded an exchange to the Indonesian Institute of the Arts, Yogyakarta as a part of the New Colombo Plan scholarship.
Outer Space acknowledges the traditional custodians of Meanjin, where this project is carried out, and we pay our respects to Elders – past, present and emerging.
Image Credit: Ivey Wawn ‘Greyness and Infinity’ 2017. Photo by Keelan O’Hehir. Courtesy the artist.
