IchikawaEdward, not to hide our stench, 2018, performance, dimensions variable, 60:00min. Performers: Kirby Casilli & Daniel Ward. Photograph: Ichikawa Lee.

Debut XV

Lauren Gostin, Andre Franco, Erin Hallyburton, Grace Carver, IchikawaEdward, Paris Fontana, Yvette James

14 Feb–2 Mar 2019

Celebrating its fifteenth year, Debut was a Blindside Project committed to fostering new talent.

writing arrangement

lines, letters, words, sentences, paragraphs

Helvetica Neue regular, 9pt, alignments and spacing – various

paper, Precision 70gsm, ink, A3, site, situation, gallery plan, sheet, page, bleed-through, variable conditions

glass, screen, pixels, resolution, aspect ratio, cathode ray tube/liquid crystal display, variable conditions

the invitation to write something for Debut XV produced a writing arrangement that is situated in the composing forces of the installation. This came about through a conversation about the approach that Bridie Lunney and James Carey took as curators in inviting graduates whose practices they had worked with as tutors and who they wanted to work with in the making of Debut XV. The selection shows their hands as artists in the choice of works as material with which to make an installation and a selection that emphasises connections with material, spatial and temporal practices. The connection with teaching is vital as the artists’ curators’ hands are extended here to enable the movement from institution to the public realm, to debut.

we discussed the idea of this text becoming part of the installation where the materiality of writing and the spatiality and temporality of texts, ideas and reading were activated. The selection of paper stock in terms of colour and gsm became important; the printing of the text and the gallery plan as installation layout on each side of the same sheet of paper with a low gsm produced a bleed-through that makes connections between words and works, essay and exhibition. Situated in the installation, the writing’s readability depends on the overall arrangement such as the time of day, the way the sheet is held up, where it is held, the background whether a glass window, a white wall, a concrete floor, a steel sheet, in Blindside or somewhere else. While still part of Debut XV, the writing arrangement for the website is immersed in different temporal, spatial and material conditions. Each writing arrangement open to the composing forces of Debut XV.

writing about arrangements – this is the fifteenth Debut arrangement in the same gallery spaces of Blindside. Debut XV is composed of practices that have not debuted before: interior design and gold and silversmithing; together with spatial practice and sculpture. Debut XV invites a different way of thinking about exhibitions from an arrangement of objects in a gallery space poised as a neutral backdrop. Here there is an interest in experimenting with objects, bodies, matter, qualities, situations and sites in time; there is a sense of everything in movement and constant change; where the works intervene, rearrange and slow down forces, making connections that produce a provisional consistency.

‘… the more we study the nature of time, the more we shall comprehend that duration means invention, the creation of forms, the continual elaboration of the new’ (Henri Bergson quoted in Daniel W. Smith Essays on Deleuze 237)

Debut XV is an arrangement in a field of relations composed of dynamic forces. It is as though everything comes from one substance; that the exhibition is actually one installation more than a collection of individual works. The curators selected graduates whose practices are open to this way of working – inventing connections with an openness to uncertainty, chance and surprise. A process of actualization, where spatial and temporal conditions are worked with a precision that emphasises particular qualities and unique combinations. The production of this installation debuts the singularity of each practice. Debut XV is perhaps a final lesson Bridie and James offer their former students – that everything is continually debuting and the value (and potency) in embracing this and not retract to certainty; to resist the closure that happens through expectations and the need to know in advance. Instead to practise staying open to what might happen; to intervene and rupture habits that maintain the familiar; to experiment with making connections that actualize real experience. As an installation Debut XV is more an event than an exhibition; a debut; a coming into the public realm for the first time for everyone and everything – continuously.

Suzie Attiwill
RMIT Interior Design

DEBUT XV, installation view of works by Yvette James and Suzi Attiwill (text). Courtesy the artists. Photo: Eliza Tiernan.

Onsite, Exhibition, Debut

Overview

An annual curated exhibition of works by recent graduates from Melbourne’s major art institutions. Selected from Contemporary Practice, Sculpture and Spatial Practice, Gold and Silversmithing and Interior Design.

Celebrating its fifteenth year, Debut was a Blindside Project committed to fostering new talent.

Key Dates

Opening: 14 Feb 2019, 7am–9am

Acknowledgment

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.

Biographies

Lauren Gostin is a practitioner who engages in a process-led practice, unpacking the potentials of working openly and responsively to material and temporal conditions in specific situations. Lauren’s process develops an archive of practice; it is an arrangement of produced material not intended to be finalised or fixed. Rather, the archive is in constant flux emulating our environments and acts as a continuous provocation for practice. This process-led practice explores methods that stabilise, suspend and amplify the forces emanating in specific situations.

Andre Franco is an Auckland born, Melbourne based artist. Interested in how one navigates the built world that we live in, the works produced by the artist interrogate the over-looked, the well-used and the vernacular, quotidian details of a certain space. Prompted by the parameters and /or conditions of the space, the artist allows these sets of rules to both dictate and open up an experience for the participant. Through the use of fabricated installations and environments, the role of the participant is to both view and be viewed, creating a simultaneous experience, encouraging the viewer to both acknowledge and participate in their surroundings.

Erin Hallyburton is an artist and researcher who lives and works in Naarm (Melbourne). Her sculptural practice engages with fat studies and intersectional theory in order to examine the conceptual and material limits of the body, and how these limits manifest in certain sites. Edible and transforming materials enact ongoing processes with the gallery space, highlighting the viscosity of architectural and hierarchal structures that are presented as neutral and static. Hallyburton is completing her Master of Fine Art candidature at Monash University.

Grace Carver’s interior and open choreographic practice centres on the importance of body and temporal relations to spaces and situations. It concentrates on using verbal and written language, objects and artefacts, to facilitate potential negotiations between bodies and spaces. This facilitates and frames events that explore interactions between spatial conditions, bodies and their environments.
Responsive actions, existing as both residues of the practice and tools for events, are analysed, altered, edited and re-arranged via the constant and continuous nature of the practice. These methods engender an attention to, and physicality of, how environments, objects and bodies are seen, activated and exchanged.

IchikawaEdward (est.2017) is a collaborative artist duo consisting of Joshua Edward and Ichikawa Lee; practicing in the mediums of sculpture, performance, installation and creative writing, the artists are conscious of demonstrating works that speak to non-hegemonic notions of the body, the body’s intimacy with space, the body’s interaction with architecture; including and more specifically the architecture of the object the body exists within or upon; questioning how our bodies rely on or subvert architectures, and what common frictions queer/othered/disabled bodies encounter today. These intentions are realised through the subversion of societal norms, stereotypes and common vernacular; as these are witnessed as the tools of erasure for those whom find themselves marginalised from dominant societal discourse.

Paris Fontana is a Jewellery Artisan and Gold + Silversmith. Her works are manifest through her Jewellery label ÎMMØRTALË. As an artist Paris has a conceptual and considered approach to design. She is an aestheticist, a collector, and a creator. Her latest collection of work; Annihilation is an inquiry into the world of the obscure, an exploration of destruction and rebirth. Set within a post-apocalyptic ecosystem, Annihilation is a collection of biomorphic jewellery influenced by human cell morphology, displaced biology and hybridity through casting. The recurrent theme throughout this collection is anatomical mimicry and the contextual displacement of form. Anatomical annihilation. Inspired by the themes of Transmutation, Alchemy, Metamorphosis, Ephemerality, ÎMMØRTALË merges the past and the present to create modern heirlooms, forever pushing the limits for what a piece of jewellery can become.

Yvette James’ practice focuses on fabricating spaces with the aim to affect the body through pre-intellectualised response. Her work strives for a level of conceptual accessibility by concentrating on individualised reactions. Informed by an amateur interest in astrophysics as well as architectural restraints, her work disrupts assumed physical reliances, creating potential responses of unrest.

Yvette completed her BFA at Monash University in 2018. Since then she has exhibited at Blindside ARI and Bus Projects, alongside participating in Hatched: National Graduate Exhibition at Perth Institute of Contemporary Art. Yvette has recently completed a residency at Popps Packing in Detroit, Michigan.

Curators

James Carey is an artist and lecturer in Interior Design, School of Architecture and Urban Design, RMIT University, and is an artistic director at BLINDSIDE Gallery in Naarm / Melbourne. James’ creative research practice is process-based, having inherent curiosities to notions of duration, labour, maintenance and value in contemporary cultures and societies.

Bridie Lunney Bridie Lunney develops her works in relation to the site of presentation, engaging the given context, physical conditions, and poetics. Combining practices of architectural interventions, sculpture, and durational performance, Lunney acknowledges the body as a conduit between our psychological selves and the physical world. She has exhibited extensively including at the TarraWarra Biennial, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne International Arts Festival, Artspace and Performance Space. She has been an artist in residence and exhibited in Chile, Saudi Arabia, and Japan.She is currently a Lecturer in Sculpture at the National Art School, Sydney, and an Advisor to Blindside gallery, Melbourne.