Thea Costantino is an artist and writer based in Perth, Australia. Her doctorate, completed in 2010 at Curtin University, proposed the ‘historiographic grotesque’ as an interdisciplinary speculative mode for the representation of history. In 2011 she won a Qantas Foundation Award for the Encouragement ofContemporary Art and is the recipient of the 2012 Artsource / Gunnery Artist Exchange at Artspace, Sydney. She is a founder and co-artistic director of the collective Hold Your Horses, formed with fellow artists Tarryn Gill and Pilar Mata Dupont in 2009. She has written numerous short stories and libretti in addition to a work of music theatre, Heart of Gold, with composition by Ash Gibson Greig, directed by Zoe Pepper and produced by Hold Your Horses at Perth Institute of Contemporary Arts performance space in 2009.
Anna Nazzari’s exhibition Horse Play at Turner Galleries presents the losing game, and the dogged impulse to try again, as an inescapable aspect of the human condition. With a nod to the absurdist existentialism of Albert Camus, Nazzari’s games, which are impossible to win, allude to the futile quest for meaning in an inherently meaningless world. For Nazzari, this nightmarish scenario provides the ground to[.....]
Alex Spremberg’s current exhibition at Perth Institute of Contemporary Arts is an exploration of the limits of painting and a meditation upon the throwaway materials that pervade contemporary life, specifically the omnipresent cardboard box and the printed newspaper. Wrong Angles is, ostensibly, a painting exhibition, but despite the polychromatic riot of surfaces dripped and marbled with industrial paint, Spremberg reveals a preoccupation with the formal[.....]
Stadium, the ten-year retrospective of collaborative duo Tarryn Gill and Pilar Mata Dupont at Perth Institute of Contemporary Art, looks back on a body of work that investigates connections between nationalism, aesthetics and performance. While Gill and Mata Dupont primarily focus on Australian nationalism, their work has its genesis in the global cultural shifts – in particular the increasingly ring-wing politics – that occurred in[.....]
Before I enter the gallery space I hear the roar of the fan blower. Once inside, I encounter an enormous inflated cube emblazoned with red and white stripes, like a circus tent. I join the line of punters and wait obediently, reading the didactic gallery signage. Eventually, it’s my turn: I’m handed a hooded jumpsuit with a red geometric print. They instruct me to remove[.....]
Resonant with the uncanny impression of human presence, Ron Mueck’s hyperreal sculptures provoke a queasy fascination in the viewer. Their porous, synthetic skins are painstakingly embedded with details like body hair, fingernails and sweat. However, their unnatural scale offsets the familiarity of the ordinary bodies on show—miniature or gigantic, they possess an otherworldliness that unsettles and enthralls. Simultaneously grand and vulgar, nestled somewhere between fine[.....]
Emily Floyd, The Cultural Studies Reader (2001) Photo; Eva Fernandez For the exhibition, Why do we do the things we do, nine artists turn the mirror on their creative process with honesty and biting self irony. This group exhibition at the Perth Institute of Contemporary Arts, Australia, curated by Jacqueline Doughty, tackles the often misunderstood process of making art, with many of the artists playing[.....]
Come Hither Noise at Fremantle Art Centre in Perth, Australia is an exhibition of sound-based works, which aims to highlight connections between aural, spatial and visual perception. Curator Jasmin Stephens argues that media and even sensory distinctions are growing increasingly arbitrary in contemporary art. In this exhibition she presents a selection of works which are both noisy and resolutely visual, designed to heighten the audience’s[.....]