Odd fragments, ad infinitum
Elena Misso, Kaijern Koo, Michael McCafferty, Skye Malu Baker
11 Oct–4 Nov 2023
Odd fragments, ad infinitum collects the work of four Naarm-based artists who adopt a diaristic approach in their practices, transforming the everyday and domestic into an aesthetic experience that expresses the peculiarity of urban banality.
In the same way that a word repeated ad infinitum will eventually lose its sense of meaning, a familiar artefact presented in an unfamiliar context can disrupt and disorientate our experience of the everyday. The strange and sublime, it seems, lurk just a sidestep to the left of our usual routines and habitual surroundings. Granules in a morning coffee or dust motes in a shock of light could be the cropped slither of a fantastical science-fiction landscape when caught in the corner of the eye.
Odd fragments, ad infinitum is a group show which glories in the strangeness of urban banal. A microscope makes specimens from household materials in Elena Misso’s darkroom prints. Scale is magnified disorientingly to discover the vast within the miniscule. With a new series of screenprints, Michael McCafferty references early Hubble and television images to push back familiar interior and suburban spaces into the newly ‘seen’ and unfamiliar. Gathering material from various personal notebooks, Skye Malu Baker’s illuminated cyanotypes form cryptic maps that become a choreographic score. Kaijern Koo turns to the world of stag beetles, isolating their myriad forms and patinas to marvel in the inherent alienness of the earthly.
Saturday 4 Nov from 2-3pm
A structure that enables (but does not restrict)
An embodied pondering on the movement of atoms, command loops and entropic energies. All welcome.
Performers: Kaijern Koo & Skye Malu Baker.
Odd fragments, ad infinitum collects the work of four Naarm-based artists who adopt a diaristic approach in their practices, transforming the everyday and domestic into an aesthetic experience that expresses the peculiarity of urban banality.
Saturday 4 Nov from 2-3pm
A structure that enables (but does not restrict)
An embodied pondering on the movement of atoms, command loops and entropic energies. All welcome.
Performers: Kaijern Koo & Skye Malu Baker.
This program takes place on the land of the Wurundjeri people of the Kulin Nation. We recognise that sovereignty was never ceded - this land is stolen land. We pay respects to Wurundjeri Elders, past, present and emerging, to the Elders from other communities and to any other Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islanders who might encounter or participate in the program.
Elena Misso’s work explores lateral thought and sensory engagement within analogue photography and printing. In the quiet reservoir of the darkroom, detached from language and the visual world, the body’s other senses come forward. Prioritising experience over outcome, this open-ended approach invites experiment, tangents, dilemmas and strange paths into the process of making.
Kaijern Koo is an interdisciplinary artist living and working on Wurundjeri land in Naarm / Melbourne. Confounded by the innate human instinct to decipher and make sense, her practice gravitates towards the fantastic slipperiness of interpretation and the strange logics which often ensue.
Michael McCafferty's work is a form of extended diary keeping in which he reinterprets his own past and memories, both true and false, idealised and misremembered. Working from a foundation in drawing Michael utilises a range of techniques to navigate a line between revealing and concealing private, interior and architectural spaces, as well as the family, friends and moments that once haunted them.
Skye Malu Baker's practice is influenced by fragmentary cultural histories, the temporal slipperiness of the autobiographical and the active properties of the technologies and materials with which she collaborates. Her work is often concerned with the intertextual, the tension between the graphic and the gestural, and with narrative unwinding. Semiotic instability and inconsistencies are invited into her practice as intriguing communicative tools that make space for the poetic and unsayable. She is grateful to practice on Wurundjeri land.