13 November 2017 - 6 January 2018
Campbell Arcade, Melbourne
This exhibition exists within a subterranean corridor and therefore echoes the subconscious mind. As you traverse this liminal space each window may become a vista to recall memory, whereat art becomes therapy. In Memory Palace you become a performer of walking-meditation, activating architecture as a mnemonic device, and allowing art to serve a transformative function.
Curated by Jake Treacy
Design by Jessica Pitcher
Noah Spivak installs a new atmosphere within the vitrine, wherein components of time and memory cloud and evaporate. The exterior tiles have been cast and their surfaces sensitised with photo chemicals, allowing a subterranean crystallisation to manifest in an otherwise lightless environment. The vitrine space becomes a fragile landscape of slow tectonic movements, of crystalline growth and microcosmic eruptions, demonstrating the shifting processes of material and therefore thought. The minimalism experienced in his work is meditative, as the work evolves over time, performing the measured nature of memory.
David Mutch illuminates ruminations in ruins. His work searches for authentic experiences and the sublime in contemporary urban spaces, and these daemon etches capture light to reveal repeated gestural markings inspired by the graffiti on nearby train windows. Like abstracted hieroglyphs or scratched phone screens, their messages are phosphorous and prophetic, opening up orphic doorways to psychological reverie. They haunt their subterranean location, suspended in time, stirring the subconscious and conjuring a liminal experience. Here, we are allowed to drift in and out of thought, presence and being, as the screen becomes a map for our own hauntology.
James Murnane takes up the devotional object as means of encountering the ever ancient, ever new. The votive of an icon becomes transmuted through its materiality, attuning the spiritual. Through resplendent plumes, articulated intuitively through paint and carved wood, we are presented a moment to experience our inner life: the experience of a heart. This ethereal moment shimmers with the lustre of pearls and rainbows, reflecting evanescence upon iridescent surfaces - flashing, shining, and dispelling blindness. In an arcing choir, the panels sing a secular space into a sacred one through a universal language that is not necessarily understood, yet felt.
Aaron Christopher Rees presents a moment for a disembodied experience. Here the ghost in the machine is being conjured, summoned through glassy panels and channelled upon shinning black tablets. It’s psychic TV for optic apparitions, flickering in the basement of the city. In the underground seeing is not believing – it is a transient place, where the flow of energy is recorded and transmitted through two Orphic screens. We see the hauntings of this place and gaze back into the past. Reality, no longer concrete, slips and suddenly becomes fluid. Perception becomes otherworldly.
Darcy Smith performs memory through the boundaries of materiality and experience. In her installation, our eye dances across surfaces and into fields of colour, where a purple void is eclipsed by a pearlescent film, and an opaque obsidian glass hovers above a semi-circle. The generosity of these materials in combination with one other speaks to the composition of a healing space, articulating an overarching transformative construction to be experienced. The glass in particular is strong yet fragile and has the ability to change (through elemental contact), much like the body.
Angela Louise Powell channels energy through a monolithic sheet of brass. This metal is highly conductive, and carries the memory of the artist’s body in its newly contoured topography. Hammered and punctured, it presents a seductive reminiscence of actioning and transformation, becoming a conduit for liminality. Its mirrored surface demonstrates an emotional threshold, a physical boundary though accessible as a psychical veil, reflecting the psychological space constructed within this underground civic corridor – a place between platforms, and therefore states of mind.
Natasha Johns-Messenger reminds us that seeing can be an oracular action. In her site-specific installation, architecture becomes the new framework to experience the future and the past. It is a reflexive moment – a moment when we witness seeing ourselves see. In a way, it is like realising the stars we see in the night sky are no longer. It is beyond memory, it is present. And this is a high-tenor performance, wherein all the cosmologies of the world reverberate upon the glassy pane at once. Perception, then, is a clairvoyant distillation, and vision must be second-sight.
Jake Treacy mythologises the history of place. Within this dilapidated vitrine, rests a monolithic soap block in hues of marbled pink alluding to the goddess Aphrodite. In the myth of her birth she washes upon the shore in a pearlescent carriage, emerging from the seafoam fully grown. Hers is a symbol of fertility, and similarly new thoughts may arise like pearls from the oceanic depths of our memory. As water washes through the vitrine the block becomes activated, cleansing the space and filling it with the scent of myrtle and rose – sacred attributes of Aphrodite.
ShengYang Zhu tracks the celestial dance of the sun above, and how its healing, floating trajectory through the sky nourishes the earth below. Employing traditional Chinese medicine, she has alchemically dyed silk swaths with vegetables and plants, allowing their natural colours to remedy and imbibe restorative attributes into the textiles. Individually they are the therapeutic tools to rebalance the body, and collectively serve as colour meditations, like a solar banner wavering between dawn and dusk.
Ben Taranto offers prismatic visions through the flames of a fire, where the majesty of light is refracted and reconfigured through a new jewel-encrusted topography. These fragments of glass translate light as the sun does when reflected upon the veins of rivers from an aerial vantage, creating a permeance through kaleidoscopic-geographic veneration. However this crystalline monolith also recalls a portal of modern technology, broadcasting a microcosmic vision of the altering effects waste portends upon the landscape. Like a screen it draws you in and keeps you there; it pushes and pulls; it is the endless dim of a setting sun upon the horizon of a slow burning ocean.
Ria Green romances our sensibilities through a hazy lens, allowing our senses of awe and wonder to take flight into a place amongst clouds. Ephemeral moments are remembered through glassy surfaces, vistas recalling the sublime often experienced in nature. Her painting explores an evocative landscape of the imagination and of experience, using abstraction as a field for feeling and photography as personal memory. Some moments are opaque and we find ourselves in a grove of blossoming colour; other times voids of transparency allow us to slip into other celestial realms, moving beyond the picture plane and the present.
Nanou Dupuis sweeps a fluid gesture across a transparent film; in one calligraphic motion, a single wave washes in poetic articulation, like a vaporous plume drifting across mountains, or a black dragon snaking through clouds. Her painting is an action and cascades the architecture of space, pushing interior and exterior worlds, pulsing duality between what is seen and unseen, light and shadow, tension and flow. Her materials are mixtures of organic minerals and synthetic pigments, providing a new language of alchemy that speaks the visual experience of transcendence, beyond consciousness.
Uri Auerbach makes a machine for mediation. The capsule space has been transformed into something of an incandescent Zen garden, cultivating mindfulness. Like a constellation of memories and thoughts, the lights glow and extinguish across an infinite mirror, singing a luminous chorus between dusk and dawn, east and west. In the darkness we enter into a new meditative headspace: like a spark in the night, a thought ignites, setting off a phosphorous chain reaction of reveries and ruminations. These tidal rhythms of electricity are on an infinite loop, an electric river of unpredictable sequences. To be enlightened, we must surrender to the twin processes of time and repetition – repetition as a symbol of circularity, continuity and acceptance.
Vivian Cooper Smith casts stones across time into ambiguous formations. In his site-specific paste-ups the imagery depicts his grandfather’s rock collection, collected from across Australia and demonstrating the passing of time and ultimately mortality. However, the wisdom of the stones resonate personal memories, collected and stored into their mineral veins. Stranded far from the landscape from where they were torn they hover between now and then, here and there, and between presence and absence. The passing of time may wash over us all and like the stone, smooth out those rough surfaces into a more patient and resilient version of ourselves.
“Mnemosyne, said the Greeks, is the mother of the Muses; the Greeks, who invented many arts, invented an art of memory…the most fundamental and elusive of human powers that will plunge us into deep waters.”
- Frances Yates, The Art of Memory (1966)
"There are strange and wondrous things in these lands of darkness …I must intoxicate myself on magic perfumes in order to fathom the secrets that lie hidden in the abysses of the Unconscious."
- Carl Jung, The Dionysian Self (1911)
Threading
The glacier head
Looking hard for
Moments of shine
From twilight
To twilight
Utter mundane
A mountain shade
Suggests your shape
I wish to melt
Into you
- Björk, Vespertine (2001)
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