“Arterial Embolism”
Anna-Maria O'Keeffe
14 Sept → 6 Oct 2007

Arterial Embolism is a sculptural scenario of a seemingly dislodged and relocated urban landscape. This room sized installation sees the spatial confines of gallery 3 tightly house a ruptured chunk of runway/highway, as though it were violently removed from some exterior scene and reconstructed within the gallery.

As opposed to transport and progression, broken remnants of infrastructure become redundant and foreboding, like amputated limbs of an industrial panorama.

The work could be construed as a mock disaster, pre-empting inevitable forces of entropy and becoming a decaying monument, or a monument to decay.

Anna-Maria O’Keeffe is a Melbourne based artist. Her current body of work is a series of sculptural constructions depicting truncated fragments of earth suspended in either a state of dispersal or reconstruction. This is her first solo show.

This project has been assisted by the Australian Government through the Australia Council, its arts funding and advisory body.

Essay on Arterial Embolism by Simon Gregg, curator of City Museum at Old Treasury.