From L-R Nick Selenitsch ‘Minimal Mobility’ (2014); Lou Hubbard ‘Mobile Immobile’ (2014); Susan Jacobs ‘Citroen/Shark’ (2013) and Carrie McGrath ‘Untitled’ (2014). Image by Christo Crocker.
Slopes is not your typical gallery space. The latest project by Brooke Babington, Director of Slopes (and former Utopian Slumps Curator/Gallery Manager); Utopian Slumps Director, Melissa Loughnan, (Founding Director at Slopes) and board member Helen Hughes is, for the first part, very contemporary: it’s the effect a 12-month lease to ‘reactivate’ a dormant site owned by the philanthropic residential design group Neometro, behind which it is situated. The building is also shared by 3000 Acres, a green-thumbed start-up converting disused urban areas into vegetable and herb plots, and Place Holder café, another startup by two young baristas.
And, it’s wonky. Slopes has no choice but to own, even in its namesake, the very obvious history the space engages: the uneven floor is wedged by a car-ramp that speaks of its past life as a commercial garage. Promotional posters of dated hot-rods still remain above the patchwork of roof slats.
You will notice the posters, just as I did, because the current group exhibition, curated by artist Christopher L G Hill, is a series of hanging mobiles. Each work as different as the next, these hung collages stimulate a hyper-awareness of the space. Craning your neck, you spy Hill’s near-hidden collaged-doll piece, ‘standover (M.U.S.C.L.E.) myn’ (2012), which is most reminiscent in shape of a mobile you see above a baby’s crib, nestled next to a fluorescent lamp.
When you scan the ground, you spot Nick Selenitsch’s floating, barely-there orange ping-pong ball, one part of a work entitled ‘Minimal Mobility’ (2014), hovering in a corner, hung from a delicate wisp of orange thread. The vertical works encourage a meandering path through the space, delicately treading a circumnavigation around each piece in turn.
The title of the current exhibition, Hang in There, tenuously holds all of the divergent artworks together, just as delicately as some of the pieces hold together themselves. Each artist’s own interests and influences greatly contrast with that of the other artists – so much so that this ad-hoc grouping veers closer to something of a collection, rather than an exhibition grounded in deeper conceptual concerns.
Slopes Director Brooke Babington aims to push the envelope in curatorial practice by inviting a guest curator to program a new group show every four weeks until December 2014. Therefore, to understand Hang in There, you also need to consider the way in which Christopher L G Hill’s curatorial strategies and art practice are intertwined. Hill’s website displays photos of his artworks that involve contributions and works by other artists, along with links to his twitter-ku (twitter haiku) page full of long assemblages of words.
In his curatorial approach, Hill, according avoids directly describing any concrete artistic influences or conceptual background, letting the works speak for themselves. Hill’s idiosyncratically devoted practice, with anarchist tendencies, allows the assembled piece’s own individual resonances to shine through. To put it plainly, Hill is a collector, of sorts. He collects other people, their artworks, ideas, poetry, websites, and thoughtfully re-arranges them and curates them into something else, retaining much of their original form, or ‘freedom’. This is reflected in his work for Melbourne Now, ‘free temporal groupings’ (2013-14), which makes a point of acknowledging all of the sources of the lo-fi object grouping.
This is not to the detriment of the current exhibition, but enhances it. The curatorial style of Hill, heavily influenced by his art methodology, has clearly let the contributing artists’ central concerns have enough breathing space, resulting in works that have an air of authentic creative output. Some of their works have a clear narrative running through them, such as Susan Jacob’s ‘Citroen/Shark’ (2013), situated above the car ramp, which simultaneously acknowledges the history of the carport, as well as engages with the current shark-culling issues in Western Australia: worn-out vintage toy matchbox cars hang in a tangle with fishing weights, alongside two large paper cutouts of rather macabre paper cut-outs of sharkskin with the fins cut off, limply swaying in the breeze.
The nature of the show – using the roof and room space rather than tousling with it – works well with the uneven floor and the awkwardness of the car-ramp. It leaves no option but to approach each work afresh, from a number of sightlines and angles. The in-between temporal nature of the mobiles reflects the limited time that Slopes will exist, and this reviewer is looking forward to what the upcoming exhibitions will have in store.
Rating: 4 out of 5
Hang in There
Curated by Christopher L G Hill
Artists: Dan Arps, George Egerton Warburton, Lou Hubbard, Susan Jacobs, Carrie McGrath, Nick Selenitsch, Christopher L G Hill.
Slopes, 9 Smith Street, Collingwood
www.facebook.com/slopesprojects
5 March – 29 March
