Karike Ashworth is an interdisciplinary artist living and working in Brisbane. Her creative practice consists of time-based media, text, objects and installations. Her areas of interest include social practice, collaboration and the private-made-public. These broad areas of interest frame her more specific concerns with the way mutual implication, ambiguity and social (or emotional) discomfort in contemporary art can disrupt normative enculturation and/or aggravate the social conscious.
Karike graduated from the Queensland College of Art in 2013 with a Bachelor of Fine Arts where she was awarded the Godfrey River Medal for outstanding studio performance and was a finalist in the Graduate Art Show (GAS) at Griffith University Art Gallery. In 2014 she completed her Honours in Visual Arts at QUT where she was awarded First Class Honours and was a finalist in Excerpts: Visual Arts Showcase at The Block. Her solo exhibitionLamentation was shown at The Hold Artspace, Brisbane, in July 2014, and with the support of Arts Queensland, will be touring regional Queensland and NSW throughout 2015-2017. Her work has also featured in group exhibitions including The Proposal, Zammit Projects at Ryan Renshaw Gallery (2012), as one of three contributing artists at Redcliffe City Art Gallery’s Across The Threshold (2012), and the 2011 and 2013 Exist-ence Festivals. Other noteworthy projects include Shop Pty Ltd a collaboration with the art collective Pty Ltd in the James Street Precinct, Fortitude Valley (2012), and one in five, a public art project on the Goodwill Bridge, Brisbane (2012)
In Two Parts is an 8:12 minute single-channel video. In this work I am sitting across the table from myself, and I am reading out (to myself) responses I received from couples I had previously invited to perform in a couple-performance project Why was I so awful tonight?. In the work I am trying to figure out (with myself) what the responses mean socially and personally. I was interested in the stress and anxiety we feel as artists (and as people) when things are not going well, and there is this unproductive self-talk which goes on—two-and-fro—between the rational and the irrational sides of ourselves, and in our inner (and outer) subjective experience.
The work is strongly influenced by Andrea Fraser’s Projection (2008) and Kerry Tribe’sCritical Mass (2011). Projection (2008), is a large two-channel projection about the time Fraser spent in therapy in which, playing both herself and her therapist, she examines her increasingly ambivalent feelings about the art institution and her acceptance into it—of being in two minds about it. Critical Mass (2011) is a live restaging of Hollis Frampton’s classic 1971 film of the same title. Critical Mass (1971) was a ground-breaking experimental film which captures an argument between a couple, and cuts it up into a series of rhythmic, repetitive snippets. When I watched the Tribe film for the first time I was enthralled by the way the repetitive language thwarted the narrative, shifted the context, and transported me right back into that familiar and repetitive loop of inter-couple conflict; replicated many times in my own personal relationship. In Two Parts utilises the same rhythmic, repetitive techniques and contextual shifts used in both these work for similar aims—as a way to alter the context of the language-in-use, and to replicate the repetitive cycle of unproductive self-talk.
For more information please visit the – Artist Website