The Call

Artspace Sydney, presented part of 2019 Create NSW Visual Arts Emerging Fellowship

pierced copper sculptures, two sound pieces, 2 minutes duration

Sound composition: Spencer Anthony Reid

The Call represents a sound making process for a ritualised community gathering. Hand crafted instruments as sculptures and computer based compositions are used to explore the ongoing formation of sound and performance as language within the framework of future cultural ritualised practices, specifically looking at the medium and actions undertaken to convey the constantly evolving language of sound. Within a community’s social, political and technological spaces, the actions and mediums used to produce the sounds are perhaps becoming less permanent as the future holds abundant possibilities for sound production and the nature of community ritualised gathering and ideas of communication through sound are changing.

Dora Ohlfsen and The Facade Commission

Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney

engraved and pierced copper

12 Oct 2019 – 8 Mar 2020

BENEATH ROUTES

Presented part of Vices and Validation at L'Institut français du Liban, Beirut

copper installation and sound

Sound composition by Spencer A. Reid

Beneath routes feelings are weighted in transit, towards intersections where the grafting of two cultural bodies takes place is inevitable. It is a turbulent meeting place, in search of a self assured hammer strike to scar the present with a permanent mark and eventual history. A temporal softening of technique and symbiotic touch with material, ensures the allure of assuredness is shaken. Indented motives form processions of subtle change, existing in the momentary space, eventually fading from the form, beneath routes taken, between two points.

Organised ambient moments, feel out a sense of stability within environments constructed with archival memories and an inventory of cultural association, encouraging the investment of emotional and psychological significance. The ambient sound beneath the route is of the ephemeral technological space, fluid and borderless. It is a space for an infinite connection of performances, which become eventual truth. The ' in between' flows with currents of cultural knowledge, the communities and identities existing here are built in a space that is not physical, the physical space is perhaps the past.

Photographs taken by Gabrielle El Haddad

 RAZING LEGACY

Presented at Haven For Artists, Beirut

Razing legacy is an invitation to feel out a sense of permanence in the city. Has the city authorized an axiom of present only, rendering heritage materially impermanent, renouncing heritage to a digitally archived past? Has cultural permanence succumbed to a fluid and ambitious cultural present, fleeting immediacy replacing the windows and walls of heritage with a search engine.

Suspended in the former Beirut heritage house are three hand pierced decorative copper works. There is a stillness here, purposefully composed into the work, a conscious removal of the cascading stream of noise experienced outside. Within the stillness the significance of the relationship between heritage and the contemporary is presented for unhindered contemplation. The intricately pierced motif in the copper mirrors the heritage floor of the space. Silence helps to evoke feelings and thoughts and influences which may arise when inhabiting public spaces that are alive with the energy transferred between the past and present, as an active materiality rather than buried recollections.