If you are about, please pop along to Craft Victoria this Thursday evening to see our new works made especially for Playing Field. Pop along in between films and see a skulk of foxes dining with a rabbit (or are they preparing a rabbit feast?), maps that lead to some place familiar (or some place entirely made up), and a girl riding an ostrich through Venice (or is it?).
We'd love your company this Thursday the 5th August.
6–8pm
Craft Victoria
31 Flinders Lane
Melbourne
(The exhibition is open from Friday the 6th August until Saturday the 4th September, 2010, and it is a part of Craft Victoria's annual festival Craft Cubed.)
Similarly Gracia Haby and Louise Jennison lift off the flat plane to elevate their images using magical tricks and puzzles, with each conjunction opening a shaped door into a new world. Digital techniques are used to scour thousands of worlds, splicing, editing and constructing data files which are then very carefully printed into new icons – just like the brain does with its memories.
The circularity of the research and reward process speaks to the special character of the crafts, where process often informs the end content. It is an opposite of post-modernism, as the adventure leads the viewer to a confirmed, sure place, however subtle and shadowy to define. The ultimate source material is that place in the mind, where childhood and strange new emotions are born.
Haby and Jennison recognise that the nascent origin of a journey or story is often the chance association of an event within a convincing emotion envelope of a particular place and time. It is more a Jean Jacques Rousseau realm, where order is questioned and yet the underlying social contract remains somehow intact – pledged as it is to safety and individuality.
To read their pictures, just pretend you are one of the curious animals in the frame!
Joe Pascoe
Curator, Playing Field
Craft Victoria
August 2010
