“All Who Occupy This Great Space”
David Chesworth and Katie Lee
20 Apr → 12 May 2012
Pressure is being brought to bear on all who occupy this great space.
Mountains, great plains, dense jungles and vast deserts. All out there.
All this needs to be breathed in.
Leave yourself behind and climb into your new skin.
All Who Occupy This Great Space is a sound and sculpture installation by David Chesworth and Katie Lee.
Performances by Alice Hui-Sheng Chang and Carolyn Connors:
David Chesworth’s practice involves several diverse areas of installation art and music. Together with collaborator Sonia Leber, Chesworth works across sound, video and installation art, using the human voice as a principal medium. Recent solo exhibitions include The Way You Move Me (Fehily Contemporary, Melbourne, 2012) and Space-Shifter (Detached, Hobart 2012). Recent group exhibitions include Spaced: Art Out of Place (Fremantle Arts Centre 2012), Stealing the Senses (Govett-Brewster Gallery, New Zealand 2011) and the Melbourne Prize for Urban Sculpture (2011). Their large sound and structure project, Almost Always Everywhere Apparent, was a major solo exhibition at Australian Centre for Contemporary Art in Melbourne in 2007. Chesworth’s Richter/Meinhof-Opera, performed at ACCA in 2010 and forthcoming at AGNSW in 2012, presents a set of overlapping frozen ‘scenes’ juxtaposing terrorist Ulrike Meinhof’s and painter Gerhard Richter’s experiences in relation to Meinhof’s imprisonment and their thinking about ideology and public action. Chesworth received an Ars Electronica Honorary Mention for his sound-based installation Southgate. In 2012, Chesworth was MONA FOMA’s artist in residence which resulted in a survey of his recent works. David Chesworth is represented by Fehily Contemporary.
Working with installation and sculptural form, Katie Lee’s practice is an exploration of the physical and psychological consequences of the built environment and our negotiations within it. Her materials — wood, rubber, steel, interrupted space, light, video, performative gesture, repetition, resistance, elasticity, fixed form — may be arranged sparsely, inducing agoraphobic sensations, or at other times they exhaust the available space, airlessly, suffocatingly. These affects, these sensations, act as the husk for the political context of the work, for underneath sit larger questions about governance, control, the arrangement and restrictions of public space, of accepted architectural design, of legislation, and of dominance.
The Tyger! Tyger! project comprises six projects mounted across 2011 and 2012. Ian Haig, Philip Brophy, Constanze Zikos, Maria Kozic, Lyndal Walker and David Chesworth were invited to nominate a collaborator and to present a work at West Space. Each resulting project interrogates models for collaboration and challenges notions of ‘established’ and ‘emerging’ practice. Please see the Tyger! Tyger! page for full details. We would like to acknowledge the generous support of the Australian Government through the Australia Council for the Arts, its arts funding and advisory body.
David Chesworth collaborates with Sonia Leber on large-scale installation artworks, using video, sound, architecture and public participation. He is also known for his experimental, and at times minimalist music, and has worked in post-punk bands, contemporary ensembles, theatre, performance and experimental opera.
Katie Lee lives and works in Melbourne. She graduated from RMIT with a Master of Visual Arts in 2009 and has also studied postgraduate education and urban planning. Lee’s practice is interdisciplinary and is often an exploration of the physical and psychological consequences of the built environment. She is interested in the continuum of body and architecture that defines our movement through urban space. Her sculptural and architectural installations incorporate the performative, balancing the visual language of institutions with a sideways humour that challenges their function.
Lee has been on the board of Conical Inc. and Gertrude Contemporary Art Spaces. She lectures in the Sculpture department at the VCA, has taught in the Architecture and Design Foundation Studies program at RMIT and the Urban Planning program at the University of Melbourne.