We’re pleased to announce the opening of sᴛʀᴀɴɢᴇ ᴘᴏᴡᴇʀs, an exhibition with work by Kym Maxwell, Nicholas Burridge, Leon Rice-Whetton, next Wednesday 29 April, 6-8pm. Please come along.
The second chapter of Matter & Spirit gathers three practices around the network (electrical, mycorrhizal, logistical) as material condition and active force. Where the opening exhibition traced the life cycle of a single resource, this exhibition moves outward. Into contested river systems, industrial dead zones, and the underground life of soil. All three artists are attentive to what Jane Bennett calls thing-power - the capacity of nonhuman matter to impede, exceed, or redirect human intention. But none of the works exist outside of capital either. A river shaped by five thousand years of mining and the British company that industrialised it; a tree felled to service power lines; a portside landscape restructured around the movement of freight. They are also grounded, then, in the political question Joshua Simon poses: who extracts, who profits, and what gets left behind. The works in this exhibition follow matter as it organises itself; across, beneath, and often in spite of the systems imposed on it.
Image | Brett Eloff. The Makapansgat cobble, a jasperite pebble excavated in 1925 from the Makapan Valley, South Africa. Its nearest geological source is approximately 32km from where it was found, suggesting it was carried there by an Australopithecus africanus individual between 2 and 3 million years ago, making it one of the oldest known manuports.
A manuport is a natural object whose only transformation is displacement. No extraction, no processing, just a decision by someone to pick something up and move it somewhere else. Because manuports are unmodified, archaeologists have concluded that many must have been chosen for their beauty, making them some of the earliest known recognitions of aesthetic character, and possibly some of the earliest examples of (found) art.
This project is supported by the City of Yarra.
@kymmaxwelll @nicholas_burridge @leonrw @yarracityarts 
