WHEN : 27th Feb – 16th March
WHERE : Metro Arts
Tension 17 is an ambitious performance based installation work by Melbourne based artist Timothy Kendall Edser. Timothy began working on his Tension series here in Brisbane in 2001, and Tension 17 is for him, “a kind of reunion with Brisbane.” A graduate of QUT, it has been at 10 years since he last exhibited in Brisbane, and this series of body-based performance installations is an on-going and evolving body of work.
Tension 17 uses the gallery space as a site to physically explore ideas around the formation of masculine identity, with Edser testing the limits of his body and leaving us to contemplate the remnants and traces of these explorations. Edser’s Tension series centres on the physicality of the body and the potential for this to punctuate the frameworks of a gallery space.
Past Tension performances have seen his body being tightly compressed within a Perspex press, dragged through his own body weight in lard, running and falling through solid walls and floors, and most recently, braced into poses reminiscent of classical sculpture using prosthetic supports; testing the physical limits of his own body, and challenging the ideals of masculinity and “vulnerability of one’s own body.”
Tension arose from a hyper awareness of Edser’s own physically, large built body, and the environments in which that 6’4” frame existed within. While interested in challenging ideals of masculinity, Edser is interested in how Tension may also highlight the “vulnerability of one’s own body.”
Interrogating the constructs of the exhibition, and the gallery space; he tends not to reveal much information before a performance work, and audiences are often surprised and left to fill in the gaps.
