Image Credit: Travers Nash, Northern Bundong, Southern Bundong, hd video transferred to dvd (still), 2015.
The works currently on show at Kings Artist-Run each look at the poetry and anarchy of freeing objects, words and thoughts from their utilitarian purposes.
Drawing and anarchy, curated by Meg Stoios, combines the work of five artists who explore the freedom and power of mark making. Each work expresses anarchic thoughts, both through their subjects and forms, communicating through drawing ideas unconstrained by convention. However, as the works value intuition and fluidity, the relatively ordered and conventional use of the space for display was surprising.
While Drawing and anarchy presents a broad notion of the anarchy that can occur through personal expression, the works of Travers Nash and Ben Sendy-Smithers successfully extend this idea, focusing more specifically on freeing utilitarian, mundane objects and statements from their original contexts.
The Bundong peoples cultural awareness society by Travers Nash presents a series of conglomerate ‘artefacts’ from a fictional tribe, comprised of a myriad of mass-produced items. These range from the relatively essential like seats, ironing boards and fans to the more obscure inclusions such as a disco ball. Nash seeks to highlight ‘throw away consumer culture’, which he does convincingly through his reimaging and repurposing of objects that we often consider to be disposable after serving their one intended function.
Nash, a sound artist, has also sought to highlight the sonic properties of everyday objects. These beeping, buzzing and humming sounds are emitted by the motely objects and their functioning motors, which are ironically not connected to anything. These strange sounds add an interesting element to objects we usually consider figuratively one-dimensional, giving them a life beyond the function we assign them. The sounds also resonate through the remaining exhibition spaces, adding a quirky element to the atmosphere well suited to the idea of playful disorder highlighted by each of the works.
Ben Sendy-Smithers’ Office drawings similarly privileges the freedom that can come from disorder, when we are not constrained by preconceived ideas about the function of objects, or in this case meaning of text. Office drawings is comprised of just that- notes on paper from when Sendy-Smithers was working in an office job.
The exhibition text states Sendy-Smithers is interested in the ‘poetics of fragmented information removed from its original context and read by an audience from a generally different area of aptitudes’. While the text itself, vague notes and questions about telecommunications, is not exactly poetic, the idea that these snippets of information can take on new meanings when freed from their original context, and no longer serving a utilitarian purpose, is itself a poetic and well executed idea.
While each space is notably different, the underlying appreciation of the fluidity of meaning, function and expression across the works means that each benefits greatly from sitting alongside the others, and works seamlessly in conversation with the next.
Rating: 3.5 out of 5
The Bundong peoples cultural awareness society, Drawing and anarchy and Office drawings
Artists: Travers Nash, Ander Rennick, Katherine Botten, Meg Stoios, Tait Sengstock, Tony Garifalakis, Ben Sendy-Smithers
Kings Artist-Run
Level 1/171 Kings St. Melbourne
4 – 26 September
