Image: Mark Edgoose, Rail as vessel, titanium, niobium, 2012.
In association with the Craft Cubed festival of the handmade, Electric presents four works that merge the handmade with digital technologies, reimagining and reinterpreting the functionality of objects. The installations twist and challenge perceptions of objects, finding beauty and intrigue in deformed, abstracted and organic iterations of functional objects and systems.
The exhibition space initially appears quiet and unassuming. Textile artist Douglas McManus’ installation, the only work hidden from immediate view, is visually a point of difference. McManus’ intricately crafted garments are bold and sinister, where the other works appear subtle and restrained. The artist statement reveals a more complex idea underlying the installation, beyond his engagement with digital technologies. It outlines McManus’ interest in the ‘concealment of the male psyche’ and the metaphor of male clothing ‘that can be easily discarded and abandoned, like fetishized piles of unwashed laundry’.
The sound activated lighting incorporated into McManus’ garments is one component of an exhibition that claims to ‘engage the body in participatory gallery experiences’. This participation is limited; the only other example is Bin Dixon-Ward and Jon Osborne’s collaboration Grid Sounds. Dixon-Ward, a jeweler and Osborne, a sound artist, explore the organic sounds found within the rigid structure of the city grid, which exists to organise and direct human activity. The interactive element is that the ‘heart’ of the city can be held, its movement triggering a series of abstracted cityscape sounds played through headphones.
While the participatory aspect of the exhibition is limited, this emphasis on the interactive nature of the exhibition is unnecessary. Rather, the artist statements are perhaps its strongest assets. These statements reveal that the common focus of each work lies in their physical manipulations of materials or systems, in order to present a more conceptual idea relating to process, aesthetics or broader social discourse.
Experimental design studio Alterfact, comprised of Lucile Sciallano and Ben Landau, arguably present the clearest perspective on merging the handmade and the digital.
Alterfact utilise popular 3D printing technology, while uniquely using clay as their printed material. This distinct combination of techniques and materials ironically requires constant human monitoring to control and correct the 3D printing process, which is inherently prone to mistakes. Alterfact’s resulting installation is a series of collapsed and imploded ‘beautiful failures’; deformed clay casings resulting from digital errors, creating objects that could not be pre-programed. The inclusion of a video showing the 3D printer in action aids in understanding the work, especially for those unfamiliar with 3D printing technology.
Overall Electric promotes distinct collaborations between digital technologies and the handmade, each work extending beyond the purely functional and uniform, valuing the organic and the unique. Mark Edgoose’s work Rail as vessel directly addresses this potential of functional objects to exist beyond the self-contained. This linear work crafted from titanium is comprised of a series of shifting planes, angles, voids and diversions, which Edgoose uses to position the object as ‘an open ended sum of parts’.
While new technologies are often used to streamline the production of objects, Electric shows that combining the handmade with the digital can combat the impersonality of uniform perfection. It is the individual character achieved when objects and systems are reimagined with the aid of digital technologies that is revealed by Electric.
Rating: 3.5 out of 5 stars
Electric
Artists: Alterfact (Ben Landau and Lucile Sciallano), Mark Edgoose, Douglas McManus and Bin Dixon-Ward with Jon Osborne
Craft Victoria
31 Flinders Lane Melbourne
22 August – 3 October
