Brad Buckley and John Conomos
Brad Buckley
The Slaughterhouse Project: Alignment and Boundaries (L’Origine du monde) and I wonder whether that’s Joanna Hiffernan with a Brazilian (revisited)
and
John Conomos
The Spiral of Time
2 March to 19 May 2013
Australian Centre for Photography
257 Oxford Street
Paddington 2021 Australia
T +61 2 9332 0555
info [at] acp.org.au
Until 19 May 2013 Australian artists Brad Buckley and John Conomos will be exhibiting at the Australian Centre for Photography (ACP). These new exhibitions were both commissioned by the ACP as part of an ambitious new program of major works and are part of the Autumn Season 2013.
Brad Buckley’s Slaughterhouse Project began over two decades ago. His work, which operates at the intersection of installation, theatre and performance, investigates questions of cultural control, democracy, freedom and social responsibility.
The exhibition features a series of wall paintings, which are interrupted by a narrative text describing a sexual encounter in the tradition of French erotic literature and particularly the writers Georges Bataille and the Marquis de Sade. The installation incorporates neon, creating the mood of the boudoir, a book of knowledge placed on a medieval reading stand and a performer ‘…enthroned like a wicked governess whose seduction is to teach the art of seduction…’ who reads to the audience perched on a highchair.
Buckley is an artist, activist, urbanist and Professor of Contemporary Art and Culture at Sydney College of the Arts, the University of Sydney. Buckley’s work has been included in the 3rd International Biennial (Ljubljana, [former] Yugoslavia), the 4th Construction in Process (the Artists’ Museum, Lodz, Poland), the 5th Construction in Process (the Artists’ Museum, Mitzpe Ramon, Israel) and the 9th Biennale of Sydney, and in exhibitions at Franklin Furnace (New York), Artspace (Auckland), the Künstlerhaus Bethanien (Berlin), the Visual Arts Gallery (University of Alabama at Birmingham), La Chambre Blanche (Québec), Artspace Visual Arts Centre (Sydney), the PS1 Institute for Contemporary Art (New York), the Art Gallery of New South Wales (Sydney), the Dalhousie Art Gallery (Halifax), Tsukuba Art Gallery (Japan) and Plato’s Cave (New York).
John Conomos presents a series of autobiographical photo-performances that are concerned with autobiography, identity, memory and the passage of time. In a new HD video projection, Conomos evokes the visual features of avant-garde ‘trance’ films, using innovative visual effects ‘…with lightning bolts flashing from his eyes as if in an electro-convulsive trance…’ and a soundtrack of atmospheric recordings of his childhood. The artist explores the fragility of life, the necessity to remember the past and the intertextual links between cinema, literature, and contemporary art.
Conomos is an interdisciplinary artist, critic, writer and Associate Professor at Sydney College of the Arts, the University of Sydney. His work has been included in Funeral Songs, Museum of Old and New Art (MONA) (Hobart), An Eccentric Orbit, Museum of Modern Art (New York), Figuring Landscapes, Tate Modern (London), Video Logic, Museum of Contemporary Art Australia (Sydney) and in exhibitions at the University of Queensland Art Museum (Brisbane), Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery (Sydney), Art Gallery of New South Wales (Sydney), Institute of Modern Art (Brisbane), Basel Art Fair (Switzerland) and the Tate Gallery (Liverpool).
Conomos’ research interests include film history and theory, media theory, new media, video art and contemporary art. Conomos was a co-founding editor of the time-based media arts journal Scan+ and has contributed to numerous conferences, forums and seminars.
Publication
The exhibition is accompanied by a major publication. The 370-page monograph contains 120 colour illustrations, with essays by Edward Colless, Brett Levine and A. Andreas Wansbrough, and an extensive interview by Biljana Jancic and Alex Gawronski. The monograph is published and distributed by the Australian Centre for Photography, Sydney, Australia.
*Image above:
Top: Brad Buckley, The Slaughterhouse Project: Alignment and Boundaries (L’Origine du monde) and I wonder whether that’s Joanna Hiffernan with a Brazilian (revisited), 2013. Installation detail. Photo: Rowan Conroy. Courtesy the photographer and the artist. Bottom: John Conomos, Spiral of Time, 2013. Installation detail. Photo: Rowan Conroy. Courtesy the photographer and the artist.
