Opening Gallery Barry Keldoulis's new warehouse-conversion space this February, Cordeiro & Healy's 'Disruptive Colouration' continues the Berlin based art couples' explorations into formality, materiality, accumulation, transition, and consumerism across time and space.
The exhibition features a life size silhouette of a white elephant pierced into the wall by 700 steel ninja stars, a sliced and stacked electric blue TARDIS, and flat pack tents alongside public telephones being taken over by staghorn ferns. The show considers how ‘disruptive colouration’, the 19th century term for camouflage, takes many forms in our contemporary world and how the real workings of our globalised economies are hidden, disguised, and little discussed.
Cordeiro & Healy play in the space between creation and consumption, questioning not only the layers that disguise the simple economics that underscore our increasing globalised and technologically complicated lives, but also the alleged benefits to the individual and the effects on national identity.
Originally from Sydney, Cordeiro & Healy began collaborating in 2002 with their artwork Location to Die For, a mock sale of a public art space. In 2004 they received the Helen Lempriere Travelling arts scholarship for their seminal work The Cordial Home Project, which took forty helpers to dismantle an entire suburban house and assemble into a neat ‘stack’ at Sydney's Artspace. Following, the couple have travelled extensively overseas, the result of consecutively securing the Helen Lempriere Travelling arts scholarship, Kunstlerhaus Bethanien Residency in Berlin, Anne and Gordon Samstag Awards augmented by other grants and residencies.
Cordeiro & Healy’s photographic and sculptural works have been shown nationally and internationally and are held in many private and public collections including the Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney, Newcastle Region Art Gallery, the Australia Council for the Arts and Artbank. For the past two years they have also been included in Australian Art Collector's 50 Most Collectible Artists.
