27 January to 21 April 2024
Catherine Telford Keogh, Diane Borsato, Kelly Jazvac, Laura Moore, Meghan Price, Robert Hengeveld, Tahir Carl Karmali, Tsēmā Igharas
Erratic Behaviour is an exhibition that brings together contemporary artworks that centre human entanglements with geologic events, processes or entities, acknowledging rocks as vibrant matter that shape our understanding of time and place. While some artworks playfully evoke the animacy of boulders and rocks, others point to a world that is increasingly shaped by the climate crisis and faced with dwindling resources.The dual meaning of the exhibition’s title suggests that humans themselves are exhibiting the most ‘erratic behaviour’ of all—the industrial extraction, processing, consumption and disposal of natural resources has produced turbulent and unstable conditions. Many of the artworks brought together here resist dominant patterns of waste and consumption through a shared commitment to working with existing, found, abandoned, salvaged and reclaimed materials. The featured artists offer a range of experimental approaches to the geologic, situating themselves and the viewer within the dynamic accumulation, erosion, flow, extraction and transformation of earth materials.
You can read Erratic Behaviour: Exhibition Resource Guide here.
Katie Lawson
Curator
You can view SOS: A Collection of affect, resonance and congruency an exhibition resource prepared for SOS: A Story of Survival, Part II - The Body here. This exhibition will be on view 26 August 2023 - 7 January 2023.
SOS: A Story of Survival is a three-part exhibition exploring what survival is, what it looks like and what it means to survive.
For Part II – The Body, issues, frameworks, struggles and successes of local and global significance are brought together. Subjects include the absolute destruction of war and conflict, comfort with death as a way of living more fully, migration, food and housing insecurity, and the raucous collapse of our shared environment. The exhibition is a quietly contemporary project in that it does not pretend to find solutions to these extreme circumstances. We are past all of the tipping points. There is no going back. Instead, the works and artists gathered together here each propose and embody alternative frameworks, relations and possibilities. These are tools for survival amongst the gently falling ashes gathering on the ground and in our lungs. If we must warm our feet on the fires of the Anthropocene, how might it become possible that the distinct geological change that marks the epoch be inverted to one that is positive, recuperative and community-led? We think change takes time, but Argentine author Jorge Luis Borges reminds us: Centuries and centuries and only in the present do things happen. Our generation(s) must contrast our origins and find footfall upon unknown terrain, buoyed by care and mutual aid, so that our 81.1 years of expected corporeal survival are something more than running, relocating and rebuilding from the latest collapse and disaster.
This is a story of survival.