POTENTIAL SPACE
Sydney / Gadigal
1 - 30 June 2019
“Potential Space” was realised through curatorial collaboration between Sarah Hibbs and Kathleen Linn. “Potential Space” evokes the expanding and contracting mutability of spaces - both literal and metaphorical - through the work of seven contemporary Australian artists.
Sophie Takách, Clare Longley, Nabilah Nordin & Nick Modrzewski, EJ Son, Loc Nguyen and Xanthe Dobbie explore the infinite potential of space + bodies across sculpture, ceramics, video and painting.
Within an historic building in Ultimo, a Kennard’s Self Storage unit is utilised as a potential gallery space to critique the current social and political climate in Sydney where increasingly higher rents are changing the demographics of our city.
Media coverage included: Inner West Courier, “Gallery with Potential”, 11 June 2019, p17; FBi Radio,” Opening Night with Eddy Diamond & Orson Heidrich”; 05.06.2019, 31:40; 2SER Radio, “So Hot Right Now”, 8.06.2019, 1:40; FBi radio, “Arvos with Darren Lesagius”, 12.06.2019, 1:31; and Johanna Bear, “POTENTIAL SPACE”, Un-reviews, Un Projects, 30 September 2019.
Potential Space was possible thanks to generous support from:
• Kennards Self Storage, in-kind sponsorship of storage unit to support the exhibition’s presentation;
• City of Sydney, funding used entirely to pay artist fees;
• Campari Australia, in-kind support through provision of drinks, equipment and staff to serve cocktails and non-alcoholic beverages at the opening of the exhibition;
• Artspace Sydney, in-kind support through the loan of AV and installation equipment; and
• Isabella Chow, in-kind support through the creation of a brand identity, digital and print collateral, and the design for a small catalogue publication.
Feature of Potential Space's Inaugural Exhibition at Kennards Lock And Hire for FBI Radio's segment “Opening Night”. Produced By Orson Heidrich w. Interviews hosted by Eddy Diamond.
Potential Space
- Sarah Hibbs & Kathleen Linn, 2019
In anatomy, a ‘potential space’ describes a volume that can be created between two adjacent biological structures that are normally pressed tightly together. Our bodies abound with potential spaces - our lungs and throats, the space around our heart and the space within our wombs all expand and contract through the intake of air, fluids or other matter. These spaces are inherently uncertain, transient and mirrored in the spaces between us: physical, personal, social and political.
Potential Space evokes the expanding and contracting mutability of spaces - both literal and metaphorical - through the work of seven contemporary Australian artists. Sophie Takách, Clare Longley, Nabilah Nordin & Nick Modrzewski, EJ Son, Loc Nguyen and Xanthe Dobbie explore the infinite potential of space + bodies across sculpture, ceramics, video and painting. A Kennard’s Self Storage unit is utilised as a potential gallery space to critique the current social and political climate in Sydney where increasingly higher rents are changing the demographics of our city.
“Outside and inside form a dialectic of division, the obvious geometry of which blinds us as soon as we bring it into play in metaphorical domains.”1 There is always inside in outside and outside on the inside, especially when it comes to our bodies. We breathe air into our lungs, expanding them; fluids leave our bodies creating a crossover between inside and outside that blurs these divisions and questions the sharpness of these categories and all binaries or dialectics.
Sophie Takách, Holstered Evert Manifold [95cc], 2019, Bronze, vegetable tanned leather, buckle
Photographer: Peter Morgan
Inside and outside are inverted through the creation in positive of a negative, or potential space of the body in Holstered Evert Manifold [95cc] (2018) by Sophie Takách. Takách’s bronze cast of the space inside her vagina brings the capacity of the inside of her body across into the outside through the solidity of bronze [1.1]. Through an intimate and complex version of the lost-wax casting method, a process where a cast travels between positive and negative versions of itself before being set as a solid form, Takách has materialised a space of the body few of us have ever really seen before. Utilising bronze, she gives strength and weight, both physically and art historical, to a part of the body which is often represented crudely, if at all. Holstered Evert Manifold [95cc] forms a ritualistic and political meditation on the body. For Potential Space the work is worn in a specially designed holster and performed through an encounter between the gallery invigilator and the visitor where the work can be handled and talked about. The bronze warms, approaching body temperature, as it is passed between hands while a conversation unfolds. When not being performed, the sculpture sits powerfully in its holster, like a weapon or a strap-on.
Installation view, EJ Son, I like my eggs sunny side up, 2019 from series 계란으로 바위치다:Striking the rock with an egg, 2019, ceramics
Photographer: Peter Morgan
The first conversation I had with EJ Son was at the [temporal and physical] opening of a group exhibition that she was a part of. As we crossed the threshold, we spoke about the tactile and sensual nature of eating2 , and the physical sensation of consumption. At what point does the outside cross over to the inside?
In mathematical topology, a vessel with an opening does not host an internal space; it is homeomorphic3 to a flat piece of paper [1.2]. This is mirrored within our bodies - our ears, nostrils, mouths, vaginas, etc. Unclear, subjective boundaries between the inner and the outer characterise our bodies, Son’s vessels, and our understanding of culture, race, gender, and sexuality. A tongue-in-cheek protest against a rigid heteronormative binary, Son’s work is as slippery, fluid and malleable as the wet clay with which she works, or the amorphous properties of her recurring yolk and albumen motif.
Contrast this ambiguity to a closed topological entity; a ball, an egg, or the yolk within the egg [1.3]. Here, the boundary is both technically and intuitively obvious. The geometry between inside and outside is clearly delineated and unbroken. Yet, even where a clear distinction exists, it can be fragile and easily made ambiguous. Similar to Takách’s process, Son traverses the bounds between positive and negative, turning insides out and outsides in. Rocks sourced from Son’s local Sydney wharf are put through a process of replication via the creation of ceramic moulds. As Son strikes the [replicated] rock against her eggs4 , she cracks open their shells and in doing do, breaks literal boundaries. The potential possibility of new life is put to an abrupt end, and instead transformed into a cute, tasty and nutritious snack.
Installation view, Loc Nguyen, No Hurt, No Scar, 2018, 2 channel video work
Photographer: Peter Morgan
Nguyen’s characters speak of experiences of racism and exclusion, specifically within the queer Asian male community and whitewashed homoerotic culture. These are experiences on Grindr, and within other encounters and interactions that reflect wider systemic racism and exclusion within Australian society.
The nature of digital and cyberreal subjectivities is that they are both infinitely expansive, infinitely replicable, and infinitely fractal. One may follow an endless matrix of links and shortcuts from deep within a networked space – heading further and further away from the centre, past variations of duplicates of copies – only to find oneself back where one began, or even deeper down the throat of the cybernetic Ouroboros.6 The matrix within abounds with interrelated, simultaneous and expanding meanings. Identity, especially queer identity, is augmented within the liminal world of the online Agora.
Detail, Xanthe Dobbie, The Space Between, 2013/2019 3-channel video work comprising The Space Between, 2013 and The Second Space, 2019
Photographer: Peter Morgan
Xanthe Dobbie has carved a space for herself that exists in that temporal plane of cyber-reality. A Botticelli babe, an alien, an avatar, the artist writhes on their self-made bed of digital Rococo flowers. Opposite and staring back, a screen of text over undulating bubblegum viscera: CALM FREE WOMAN NATURE RELAX CUNT NURTURE RELAX SLUT BITCH CUNT BODY FUCK EARTH
The stream of consciousness text uses the vernacular of Dobbie’s 2013 understanding of “femininity, fluidity and stereotype[s]”.7
2nd space (2019) is a counterpoint to the The Space Between (2013), and literally fills the eponymous.8 It expands on her understanding of sex, sexuality, gender and intimacy. It doesn’t necessarily ‘fill a hole’ or an absence, but acts as an expansion through division. One space becomes two, while two objects become three - Dobbie works outside of the binary; yes and no, no and yes, simultaneously and all at once.
Detail, Clare Longley, Repetitive gestures II (ectopic), 2019, Acrylic on canvas, two canvases
Photographer: Peter Morgan
In Repetitive gestures II (ectopic) (2019) Clare Longley repeats a floral motif over and over again on top of itself until it dissolves into a near monochrome red. The mirrored silhouette of a butterfly surfaces across the two canvases, one wing on each. Longley, frequently repurposing romantic and dreamy symbols in her work such as love hearts, flowers or butterflies, uses repetition and the resulting accumulation of layers of paint to exhaust these symbols of their meaning and affect. In so doing she subverts the commonplace or clichéd interpretations that are often attached to these motifs.
Comprised of two canvases, Longley’s work Repetitive gestures II (ectopic) (2019) represents two halves of a butterfly that sit on opposite ends of the same wall. Ectopic refers to something being in an abnormal place or position, here the butterfly sits in a state of rupture, dissected and split across the wall [1.4]. Between the parts, a portal to the outside world that is closed, where naturally a butterfly would be free to fly, here it is split in two and enclosed rendering it flightless. In generating these parallels between exhaustion and flightlessness, Longley explores emotional and physical labour.
Where does our own potential physically exist? We often use objects as vessels for our aspirations or memories but they end up packed away in basements, attics and storage units. With all this cardboard, bubble wrap and packing tape, the storage world becomes an absurdist purgatory for objects.9
Detail, Nabilah Nordin & Nick Modrzewski, You only pay for what you use, 2019, Found objects and mixed media
Photographer: Peter Morgan
Nabilah Nordin and Nick Modrzewski transform domestic objects into sculptural works through a kind of alchemy. Discarded contemporary ‘relics’, such as a chair or a lamp - objects no longer serving their intended purpose - are metamorphosed into abstracted fossils of the ‘thing’ they once were.10 The object, using the vernacular of urban and suburban living, is given a new potential and brought to life. In You only pay for what you use (2019) contrasting texturality abounds - thick plaster globily covers fabric, paint covers bubble wrap, hard and soft antagonise each other drawing you in and pushing you away. Utilising artworks from previous exhibitions, Nordin and Modrzewski adorn them in new skins ready for their new repurposed life within another exhibition. This action reflects on the reality of working as a sculptor when space is a high-priced luxury.
The objects in Potential Space rest, dormant once installed until the opening. For several hours a day they are given a chance to live before us, playfully and full of joy, before the exhibition closes and they hibernate once more, awaiting their next opportunity to revivify.
Installation view, EJ Son, I like my eggs sunny side up, 2019 from series 계란으로 바위치다:Striking the rock with an egg, 2019, ceramics
Photographer: Peter Morgan
1 Bachelard, G., 1958, The Poetics of Space, Presses Universitaires de France. p:227.
2 A live octopus, specifically, which first enters us, then becomes a part of us, at which point anything that can’t be absorbed by our body is expelled as waste. She showed me the tattoo of a cephalopod on her stomach, which moved as she breathed.
3 Topologically identical.
4 ‘계란으로 바위치다: Striking the rock with an egg’ … is a Korean proverb that is used to describe situations where the actions feel useless and meaningless as the rock is indifferent to the ‘eggs’.” - EJ Son, 2019.
5 Nguyen, L., 2019 statement by the artist.
6 space.com/space/space/space/space/space/space/space/space/space etc……
7 Dobbie, X., 2019 statement by the artist.
8 THE SPACE BETWEEN | 2nd space | THE SPACE BETWEEN.
9 Marc Augé discusses the concept of limimal and in-between spaces in his formative text “Non-Places Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity” 1995.
10 Modrzewski, N., 2019 statement by the artist.
Catalogue design: Isabela Chow