Occupy: The Exhibition
Engaged as curator and writer of Occupy: The Exhibition at Vacant Assembly run by 2022 Australasian Students of Architecture Congress (ASAC).
Brought to you by the 2022 Australasian Students of Architecture Congress (ASAC)
A collection of five artists from different backgrounds, different places, practising with different mediums all responding to the same theme of Occupy ~
What does it mean to occupy? Not just physically but culturally, socially, mentally and politically as well.
How do we occupy space? Not only architectural spaces: but also community spaces, spaces of care, of ownership, our internal headspace, spaces which stretch through time and those beyond the physical realm.
Artists: George Goodnow, Claire Grant & Kuweni Dias Mendis, James Hornsby & Lillian Whitaker.
Presented by the 2022 instalment of the Australasian Students of Architecture Congress is the third hors d'oeuvre in their conceptual tasting platter, Occupy: The Exhibition. Derived from a curiosity in agonism, honesty and the role of the contemporary architect, this exhibition intends to explore the theme of Occupy through the critical framework of an artist.
What does it mean to occupy physically, culturally, socially, mentally, and politically. How and what spaces are we occupying? Spaces of the urban form, of community, of care, of ownership, of our mindset, of space which transcends time and place.
This concept proliferates and seeps into the dialogue of artists James Hornsby, Lilian Whitaker, George Goodnow & collaborative duo Claire Grant and Kuweni Dias Mendas. Both fusing and transmuting architecture and art into an assembly of creative explorations, Occupy as an exhibition reveals the influence of junctures and crossdisciplinarity synergy. It is a meeting place of ideas, a collision of practices, and a celebration of early career visual artists that both absorb and inhabit our ‘small town city’.
Highlighted by the work of James Hornsby and George Goodnow is the fluidity and mailability of interior and exterior structural space (so commonly assumed as static and frank). Hornsby’s Yucky Man and Magic Carpet unfurrow as if they were a surrealist trance; the floor dissolves and ripples, and the human liquifies. Finding its roots within the critical dialogue of our Digital Age, Hornsby’s hyper-real, vivid work exposes the uncanniness of real and imagined space. The effect of his work teeters on the edge of wonder and overwhelm, beauty and terror, the outside world, and the internal psyche. Hornsby’s contribution represents the slippery space between dreams and reality, imbuing the limitlessness of human imagination into the confines of our physical realm. Goodnow’s ceiling installation of undulating façade texture follows a parallel conceptual vein. Their site-specific installation Merge conceptually responds to the local industrial architecture surrounding Vacant Assembly and reimagines familiar structures, materials, and patterns. Goodnow’s installation explores the use of metal and fabric and merges the industrial with the domestic, the interior and exterior, the hard, and soft, to consider non-binary possibilities where these concepts are not odds with one another but rather intersecting and overlapping in a myriad of possibilities.
Shifting toward explorations of the natural environment, the work of Lilian Whitaker and collaborative duo Claire Grant and Kuweni Dias Mendas underscore the unavoidable influence of nature and question the ethics of human intervention. Grant and Dias Mendas’ embroidered cyanotype Heart of the River takes its form on a 1933 flood map of the Brisbane River. Placed into our current context, this map indicates the major flooding events of 1974, 2011 and now 2022. These events have undoubtedly raised major public questioning around the problematic positioning of infostructure so close to the river’s edge and question colonial development that ignored Indigenous warnings of the river’s cyclic behaviours. Responding to this uproar, as well as the fluctuating power of water, Grant’s photographic practice is overlaid with Dias Mendas’ fine 24-karat-goldstitching to reveal a synergy of practice and response to place. Through this delicate collaboration atop a symbol of our city, their work beacons sensitivity, empathy, and a rejection of anthropocentric tendencies. Mutualisms by Whitaker shifts its mapping of nature to that of Honeybee’s, equally advocating for a rise in ecocentrism. Each wax sculpture is created when the artist places a nonintrusive form into a bee’s hive. Produced are intricate and twisting sculptures that allow us an insight into the highly considered architectural practice of these non-human creatures. The audience is allowed the opportunity to marvel at the ability, attention, and collaboration of these creatures to build not only a beautiful structure, but a functioning and flourishing ecosystem. The relationship of a hive to its environmental surroundings is explored though Whitakers focus on mutualisms and symbiosis, as is the relationship between honeybee and artist in her gentle collaboration.
The five artists within Occupy: The Exhibition offer a diverse range of perspectives. Each presented artwork collectively provides meaningful insights into the co-dependency of networks and the unavoidable influence that physical space has upon us and our impact on it. The notion of Occupy is explored in this confluence of creative practices and the intersection of art and architecture. The result – a greater sense of cross-disciplinary community and understanding through the unfolding of natural, physical, structured and imagined spaces.
Essay by Taylor Hall, Photography by Cian Sanders.