NonProjectCBR: From 2018 I started a series of social practice projects and interactive installations in non-art spaces in Canberra that attempts to NOT define, to BREAK boundaries, and to NOT achieve. It is a practice of doing and enduring. Long-term project.
'Re-discovering home' is a little show that happened at home around July to September 2019 to re-discover my relationship with the space I live in every day. It happens throughout the house but the main exhibiting site is a spare room in the southeast corner.
It was initiated as an experiment to reflect on my curatorial practice. After five years of studying art history and curatorship, I still can't fully understand a lot of the questions. What is curating? Why this space? How to interact with space and the context? What works should be selected to express what ideas? What is 'meaning'? Does a curator create, interpret, analyse or invalidate meaning? What is the relationship between text and artworks? How to engage your audience and what is actual engagement? How to make works and exhibitions that do not rely on money?
During the experiment, I made lots of tags using torn prints from my previous works, typed with my secondhand typewriter from Greenshed. These tags were either distributed or stuck on some unexpected spots at home using bluetags. One series of the tags reflect my individual desire expressed through space, for example, 'turn me on' on a light switch, 'dust me' in the corner of the bottom window frame, 'life me up' on a washing machine lid. As my family still lives together I was in a constant battle with my dad who keeps the world clean and organised. He kept throwing away any tag he found that was not on a collective spot, i.e. a paper, a canvas, a box. While I have disassembled all the works, I left the scattered tags in the house so people can interact with them, move them, throw them away, ignore them. There is still a tag that no one has found yet - it reads 'leave me alone'.
The show was set up before I had several dinner parties, including some tools and my typewriter with which new tags could have been made. Some people adventure out creating new tags and reacting to the existed ones, like 'fold me', 'take me away', etc.
It was a show undeniably related to words and symbols, with my monotype, collages and artist's book also exhibited. I was attempting to set up a poetic, personal, emotional, contextual show, which foremost was for myself to reflect upon.
2019 in Canberra