Paul Yore: WORD MADE FLESH

ACCA is proud to present Paul Yore: WORD MADE FLESH, an extensive survey exhibition encompassing the full scope of the artist’s work, including appliquéd quilts and needlework, banners and pendants, collage and assemblage, and large-scale mixed media installation. The exhibition, which continues ACCA’s contemporary Australian solo series, is constructed maximally as a gesamtkunstwerk, presenting work over the past 15 years, alongside a major new room-scaled sculptural installation developed especially for the exhibition.

Paul Yore is one of Australia’s most thought provoking and consequential multidisciplinary artists. Born in Naarm/Melbourne in 1987, he lives and works on Gunaikurnai Country in Gippsland, Victoria, and completed his studies in painting, archaeology and anthropology at Monash University in 2010. Yore’s work engages with the histories of religious art and ritual, queer identity, pop-culture and neo-liberal capitalism, recasting a vast array of found images, materials and texts into sexually and politically loaded tableaux and assemblages which celebrate hybrid and fluid identities, unstable and contradictory meanings, and the glowing horizon of queer worldmaking.

Paul Yore: WORD MADE FLESH is structured around five purpose-designed spaces presenting specific bodies of work and discursive contexts: Signs; Embodiment; Manifesto; Horizon; and Word Made Flesh. This itinerary articulates two key trajectories in the artist’s work: the first charting the development of Yore’s textile practice, beginning with small, embroidered works through to large-scale appliquéd quilts, which variously draw on the traditions of classical Greek art, decorative Flemish and French tapestries, trashy pop-culture, gay porn, cartoons, psychedelia, narrative and history painting, as well as the decorative semantic excesses of rococo style. The second trajectory is represented in a new kaleidoscopic, architecturally-scaled installation, anarchically composed of improvised makeshift structures, mixed media sculpture and found objects, collage and assemblage, painting, video, sound and light. This immersive installation imagines a queer alternative reality, erected from the wasteland of the Anthropocene, performatively implicating itself into the debased spectacle of hyper-capitalist society.

Coinciding with the exhibition at ACCA, a major monographic book is forthcoming, published by Art Ink in association with the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art. With over 400 pages of images and newly commissioned writing, the publication features texts and essays by leading Australian and international artists, scholars and commentators including Tony Albert, hanna baer, Mikala Dwyer, Daniel Fountain, Helen Hughes, Bruce LaBruce, and an extended interview with Paul Yore by Max Delany.

Curators: Max Delany, in collaboration with Devon Ackermann and Paul Yore.

Paul Yore in conversation with Nick Henderson, Saturday, October 1, 5pm
Paul Yore will be in conversation with Nick Henderson, volunteer committee member at the Australian Queer Archives, and Curator at the National Film and Sound Archive of Australia. For further information visit accca.melbourne.