“Wayfind”
Brian Fuata, Shannon Lyons, Jessie Bullivant, Debris Facility Pty Ltd, Dean Cross, Spence Messih and Amelia Winata
5 May → 20 May 2018
Far from neutral, architecture often represents certain dominant groups at the exclusion of others. Melbourne-based curator and writer Amelia Winata presents Wayfind in an attempt to awaken the viewer’s consciousness to question the deeper narratives at play in our built environment.
Through a series of new commissions by Australian artists – Jessie Bullivant, Dean Cross, Debris Facility Pty Ltd, Brian Fuata, Shannon Lyons and Spence Messih – Wayfind presents new perspectives on the political and social aspects of architecture that are often ignored: neo-liberalism, colonialism, heteronormativity and gender specificity. Held at the Emely Baker Building, a former council-run child and maternal health centre in Fitzroy North’s Edinburgh Gardens, the exhibition features site-specific installations, interventions and improvised performance works – designed to connect audiences to the indirect and not so subtle politics inherent in everyday architecture.
Public programs
Performance by Brian Fuata
Saturday 5 May, 2:30pm, West Space, Bourke Street Mall
Panel discussion, chaired by Amelia Winata with Simona Castricum, Charlotte Day and Shannon Lyons
Thursday 17 May, 6pm, West Space, Bourke Street Mall
This exhibition was presented offsite at the Emely Baker Centre in Edinburgh Gardens.
Co-commissioned by West Space with Next Wave.
Brian Fuata works in performance through live and mediated forms. He employs various modes of presentation within the framework of structured-improvising. The act of viewing is a reciprocating action between artist and audience, the audience with each other met at the apparent content of the performance itself.
Shannon Lyons attempts to unpack the complex relationships that exist between artistic content and context in her multidisciplinary practice. She continually adapts, draws from and responds to specifically located built environments, producing works which directly reference the site where they were made or are eventually exhibited.
Jessie Bullivant is a practitioner from Melbourne. She produces work that draws on histories of conceptual art and institutional critique in dialogue with social and feminist practices. Her works interrogate the operation of power structures, by engaging with systems of communication, bureaucracy and interpersonal dynamics.
Debris Facility Pty Ltd is a Melbourne-based cross media artist, often generating installation, sculpture, jewellery and other wearable works. Since graduating from ANU, Canberra School of Art, they have sustained an active art practice with projects through Australia, New Zealand and Indonesia.
Dean Cross is a First Nations trans-disciplinary artist. He has been formally trained in both contemporary dance and sculpture, and works across the sculptural and pictorial fields. Through this he attempts to re-evaluate and re-construct what it means to be Australian in the 21st Century, and how that fits within our globalised world. Dean was born and raised on Ngunnawal country, however his ancestral roots lie within the Worimi Nation.
Spence Messih is an artist and writer based in Sydney, Australia. Through sculpture, installation, image and text Messih’s practice centres on abstraction and minimalism as a site to explore trans(gender) materiality. Messih’s work comments on the politics and poetics inherent in personal disclosure and social commentary and the power relations inherent in physical, systemic and psychological space, particularly in relation to their own trans experience.
Amelia Winata is a Narrm Melbourne-based writer and curator. She has written for various publications and galleries including Art Monthly Australasia, Art Guide, Australian Art Collector, un, Shepparton Art Gallery, CCP and MUMA.