Lisa Andrew, Hany Armanious, Stuart Bailey, Jay Balbi, Joanna Callaghan, Liz Day, Deej Fabyc, Ian Geraghty, Sarah Goffman, Kathryn Gray & Holly Williams, Ross Harley, Mark Hislop, Emily Hunt, Andrew Hurle, Melanie Khava, Claire Lambe, Sally Mannall, Elvis Richardson, Tobias Richardson, Raquel Ormella, Luke Parker, Elizabeth Pulie, Mary Teague, Regina Walters
12 - 29 October 2005
CROSS CONVERSATIONS
ELASTIC is a group of nine artists who create
projects that invite other artists to participate with a view to expanding
the scope and interpretation of a project. This democratising curatorial
model allows unexpected outcomes.
The Elastic: Archive Project displays, in various forms, the collecting and classifying
activities that engage these artists’ practices as both research and raw
material. Classifying systems are fundamental not only to public and private
collection activities but relate, in a gallery context, to the manufacture of
authenticity within the art-culture system. This exhibition explores this operation
by placing private studio process in the lived context of the gallery space.
The resulting archival categories range from fantastic or absolutely bloody useless
catalogues of vernacular objects or adornments, to straight-faced empirical research
into, for example, the reasons given by an arts council for rejecting a grant
application or under-representation of women artists in contemporary criticism.
The archive even has its own exhibition reviews.
Draw your own conclusions with regard to the authenticity of the artists’ interpretations
of material and museum culture!
From a historical perspective the Elastic Archive Project harnesses conceptual
and process art’s critical forces as well more recent methodological innovations
using analytical techniques appropriated from interdisciplinary and institutional
critique. Out of these parameters a new direction in contemporary art has emerged.
The emphasis is on the formal experiments of individual artists. In this way
and by these means, contemporary life and issues of the marginal or unfashionable
can be given prominence.
Opened by Susan Charlton Creative
Producer, State Records NSW (State
Government Archives), 15 October 2005. READ TALK. (pdf)
Cross Conversation with the Artists 22 October 2005, for Kings Cross
Arts Festival.
The Archive Project is the latest Elastic ‘edition’. Artwork editions are available exclusively for the exhibition
ELASTIC
Elastic’s prior projects include running an eponymous shop-front gallery in Chippendale (for 6 months in 2000), Caravan a survey style show at Free Space (2002) and the publication of the celebrated Elastic: A Printed Project in 2004. Last year, Elastic moved off-shore to establish Elastic Artist Residence in Whitechapel, London, curated by Deej Fabyc as a gallery space for projects and durational performance.
