MEDIA RELEASE
cacsa projects 2013 project 5
Manifest 2 in conjunction with
The Qantas Foundation Encouragement of Australian Art Award
Sue KNEEBONE dark manners OPENING FRIDAY 7 JUNE 6–8pm
Artist talk Friday 7 June@5.30pm
Opening speaker Lisa Slade, Project Curator, Art Gallery of SA Image: Sue Kneebone, Bush Craft, 2013 Photo courtesy the artist
Continuing the CACSA’s ongoing commitment to the professional development of South Australian contemporary visual arts practice, CACSA Project 5 presents MANIFEST 2, a major solo exhibition by South Australian artist, Sue Kneebone. The MANIFEST series (the first being Roy Ananda) complements the recent highly successful CACSA multi-site projects of CACSA CONTEMPORARY 2010: THE NEW NEW, CACSA CONTEMPORARY 2012: NEW SOUTH AUSTRALIAN ART and IBIDEM, and major solo presentations over past SALA Festivals of Paul Hoban, Matthew Bradley and Louise Haselton. The MANIFEST series focuses on South Australian artists who have been awarded the prestigious Qantas Foundation Encouragement of Australian Art Award —Roy Ananda 2010 and Sue Kneebone 2011 (Heidi Kenyon was awarded the prize in 2012 and will also feature in this year’s program). The Qantas Foundation Encouragement of Australian Art Award recognises emerging Australian contemporary artists and aims to increase awareness of Australian contemporary art by encouraging promising, emerging artists to produce further work. It is a unique art prize in that it recognises an artist’s body of work rather than awarding artists for individual pieces. The Contemporary Art Centre of SA is proud to be the South Australian host organisation since 2010 for this prestigious award. Sue Kneebone’s exhibition Dark Manners explores the medical frontier from a time when a growing interest in the natural sciences and evolutionary theory led to a dark and complex trade between colonial Australia and the centre of the British Empire. It delves into the murky morality of respectable men of medicine in nineteenth-century Australia and Britain who procured and donated human and animal remains for museum collections. Dark Manners reimagines Australia as a nebulous laboratory at the far edges of Empire where ‘gentlemen scientists’ become the shadowy subjects of their own curious predilection for collecting. The material hybridity in Dark Manners creates an uneasy tension between the unspoken interiority of polite society and the duplicity of dark deeds committed ‘in the interests of human kind’, which continue to haunt the present. Sue Kneebone is an Adelaide-based artist who completed her Masters in Fine Art at the Victorian College of the Arts in 2000 and her PhD in visual arts at University of South Australia in 2010. Her interest in the legacy of Australian colonial settler culture has led her to explore the intersections between nature and culture, history and memory. Central to her studio practice is the transformative process of mixed media assemblage and photomontage that allows for new associations to be made from fragmented clues found in museums, photographs and archival material. Sue Kneebone has been exhibiting nationally since 2000; recent exhibitions—the Australian Embassy in Washington, South Australian Museum, and CACSA CONTEMPORARY 2010: THE NEW NEW and CACSA CONTEMPORARY 2012: NEW SOUTH AUSTRALIAN ART. Her work has been collected by the Art Gallery of South Australia and private collectors.
Dark Manners was initiated by the Qantas Foundation Encouragement of Australian Art Award, and supported by the Australia Council for the Arts and Arts SA
EXHIBITION DATES 7 JUNE–14 JULY, 2013 Gallery opening times Weekdays 11am—5pm | Weekends 1pm—5pm
CONTEMPORARY ART CENTRE OF SOUTH AUSTRALIA 14 PORTER STREET, PARKSIDE, ADELAIDE, SOUTH AUSTRALIA 5063
Tel +61 [08] 82 72 26 82 Fax +61 [08] 83 73 42 86 admin@cacsa.org.au
www.cacsa.org.au
THE CONTEMPORARY ART CENTRE OF SA IS ASSISTED BY THE COMMONWEALTH GOVERNMENT THROUGH THE AUSTRALIA COUNCIL, ITS ARTS FUNDING AND ADVISORY BODY, AND THE SOUTH AUSTRALIAN GOVERNMENT THROUGH ARTS SA THE CONTEMPORARY ART CENTRE OF SA IS SUPPORTED BY THE VISUAL ARTS AND CRAFT STRATEGY, AN INITIATIVE OF THE AUSTRALIAN, STATE AND TERRITORY GOVERNMENTS
MEDIA RELEASE THE PROJECT SPACE Madison Bycroft It Division
Image: Madison Bycroft, Becoming heavy, 2013 Photo courtesy the artist
Through video, performance and sculpture, Madison Bycroft explores an animist way of being in the world, rethinking what it means to be a ‘person’ and relating to others. Her video and performance works often present as short experiments in unlearning the self, undoing normalised modes of being, the practice of empathy and processes of becoming other. In lieu of categorical and colonizing thought, Bycroft is interested in relational understanding, something which requires com-passion: in Latin, a feeling with that extends to difference—to the animal and other people—creating a sense of communion with the world. In It Division, Bycroft engages with the inanimate in video, performance and sculpture. She readdresses objects as subjects, acknowledging their abilities to animate and resonate with us. Through empathic experience and relational understanding the realm of personhood is far more expansive. The objects/things do not sit comfortably within any boundary, limit or name. They emanate alchemic qualities, and may activate some kind of special magic in the way we perceive the world. Madison Bycroft is an emerging artist based in Adelaide, South Australia. She completed a Bachelor of Visual Arts with first class honours at the University of South Australia in 2012. She has exhibited in group and solo shows in public, commercial and artist run galleries, as well as experimenting with non-traditional sites. In 2013, Madison participated in her first artist residency in Beijing, China, and will travel to Brooklyn NYC for her second international artist residency in October. This project has been made possible by the support of the Helpmann Academy.
EXHIBITION DATES 7 JUNE–14 JULY, 2013 Gallery opening times Weekdays 11am—5pm | Weekends 1pm—5pm
CONTEMPORARY ART CENTRE OF SOUTH AUSTRALIA 14 PORTER STREET, PARKSIDE, ADELAIDE, SOUTH AUSTRALIA 5063
Tel +61 [08] 82 72 26 82 Fax +61 [08] 83 73 42 86 admin@cacsa.org.au
www.cacsa.org.au
THE CONTEMPORARY ART CENTRE OF SA IS ASSISTED BY THE COMMONWEALTH GOVERNMENT THROUGH THE AUSTRALIA COUNCIL, ITS ARTS FUNDING AND ADVISORY BODY, AND THE SOUTH AUSTRALIAN GOVERNMENT THROUGH ARTS SA THE CONTEMPORARY ART CENTRE OF SA IS SUPPORTED BY THE VISUAL ARTS AND CRAFT STRATEGY, AN INITIATIVE OF THE AUSTRALIAN, STATE AND TERRITORY GOVERNMENTS