Object Therapy Scott Mitchell 17 May - 8 June 2013 Opening: Thursday 16 May, 6-8pm Artist talk: Thursday 6 June, 5.30-6.30pm
Scott embarked on a journey to discover the nature of objects. A series of conversations were conducted to explore the role objects play in our lives. Notes were taken, items were collected. But through this journey into multiplicity Scott became obsessed with just one object – a singular image – Buckminster Fuller and Shoji Sadao’s Cloud Nine project. And like Richard Dreyfuss’s character in Close Encounters of the Third Kind he began to obsessively build this image.
Giving away something that is free Jessie Bullivant 17 May - 8 June 2013 Opening: Thurs 16 May, 6-8pm Artist Talk: Thursday 6 June, 5.30-6.30pm.
Jessie Bullivant will investigate the relationship between the size of an action and it’s weight by employing space in a high volume daily publication. During the exhibition, West Space will be an access point for this work and will also host other analogous gestures.
Working in a number of contexts and capacities, Bullivant is interested in the relationships between actions and events that occur inside and outside of the gallery, both arranged and incidental. To this end, fields as diverse as transport, construction, communication and others are not merely referenced but employed in the making of work. The interaction with these independent systems has the potential to extend the dimensions of the work beyond the architecture of the gallery and community of the artist.
Title Pulp Fictions Artist name Jonas Ropponen and Andy Hutson 17 May - 8 June 2013 Opening: Thursday 16 May, 6-8pm Artist Talk: thursday 6 June, 5.30-6.30pm
Ropponen and Hutson are both sculptors who work with paper-mâché. It is the basic process of creating paper-mâché – essentially the dismantling and reconfiguration of materials – that forms the central trope of this project. The artists have established a simple system of exchange: an object is selected – a book, a sculpture, a pot plant, an email – and is reconfigured by the other in their studio, creating a new entity. The resultant works, and their cumulative narratives, will form the body of the exhibition
The intention is to activate systems of production that allow for haphazard, imperfect answers to incomplete questions. Pulp Fictions is an attempt to transfer the chaos of the studio into the gallery, to return phenomena to the ambiguity of the world.
Spaceship ‘Kari-nui’ Risa Sato 17 May - 8 June 2013 Opening: Thursday 16 May, 6-8pm Artist Talk: Tuesday 28 May, 5.30-6.30pm
Japanese artist Risa Sato will present research and background material into her concept for building an inflatable spaceship in Melbourne. Over two weeks the Spaceship will appear in different public locations across Melbourne. This exhibition is the reciprocal artist exchange between West Space and the multifunctional space Zou-no-hana Terrace in Yokohama, Japan.
Kari-nui" means a fitting, literary Kari means temporary, Nui means sticking. The title thus indicates the sense of ‘forever temporary, forever in process, the endless possibility to be revised". It is in the future tense, like a spaceship in future, and also imperfect form with low cost and hand stitched by the artist, as if it represent artists’ status, in general, forever works for dreams.
Port Journey is a network of partners and events founded on the innovative concept of connecting contemporary art with the public in major port cities. This artistic exchange is the commencement of a proposed six member network: ↔Yokohama↔Melbourne↔Dalian↔Singapore↔Hamburg↔San Diego↔
Inherited and Borrowed Andie Tham 17 May - 8 June 2013 Opening: Thur 16 May, 6-8pm Artist talk: Thursday 6 June, 5.30-6.30pm
The works for Inherited and Borrowed involve the translation of existing and imagined objects into a series of new bronzes and paintings. The sculptural works are cast from cardboard silhouettes that echo everyday table paced household effects. These forms are flanked alongside a series of paintings taken from reproductions of ancient vessels that, in execution, both depict and shroud the source image. Inherited and Borrowed marks my interest in tropes towards the representation of high and low forms of everyday objects. Andrea’s practice is concerned with images of “re-made, ready-made” objects through intensive process based methods.
