NEW SHOWS 12/08/08 – 30/08/08

MAIN GALLERY | Vittoria di Stefano, Kirsten Perry & Clair Dougherty

SKINNY GALLERY | Ian Wadley

SOUND GALLERY | dimple…)

Opening Tuesday 12 August 6-8pm …Until Saturday 30 August

I EAT MEMORIES | Vittoria di Stefano, Kirsten Perry & Clair Dougherty

They say that at the moment of death, one’s life flashes before them. This montage of images documents the moments that comprise our own private story. How would this movie play out? Which images would be pulled from the recesses of consciousness to illustrate our own journey? Which images remain significant to us, and which fade into the ether? How accurate would our recollections be? Often through the muddy lens of memory, images are distorted, the order of events muddled, the size and proportion of objects misjudged, with results ranging from amusing to terrifying.
Vittoria Di Stefano, Clair Dougherty and Kirsten Perry are three Melbourne-based artists who explore these ideas through their respective practices of installation, sculpture and animation. They examine the role that memory plays in our lives today and how it affects our current experiences, including the idea of “collective memory”: archetypal memories that many of us share. I Eat Memories is an exhibition of new, site-specific work for Bus that investigates these themes.

ROOM TO LIVE AGAIN | Ian Wadley

Combining audio, photography, installation, and an artist-residency with a twist, Room To Live Again is a show about living nowhere in particular and feeling at home anywhere; about leaving home for work and not being sure if you’ve arrived; and the eternal question of when to go home again and where exactly that might be.
One end of the space is a “residency”, furnished with a couch, sleeping bag, lamp, guitar and laptop, where the artist will live and work for 3 weeks. At the other end is an “exhibition” of larger photographic prints – in the residential end, screen images and smaller prints will be available for the audience to view and leaf through. The artist inhabits the space, living and working on audio (and visual) projects. Visitors are welcome to interrupt with enquiries. Sound is an integral part of the exhibition, as musical as it is improvised.
Ian Wadley, a musician and photographer, has lived the last 3 years out of a suitcase, since a brief tour of Europe (with avant-rock band Bird Blobs) turned into a year in Berlin, 5 months back in Melbourne, then another year travelling in the USA, UK, Europe and Japan. He has never stayed more than 5 weeks at any address in this time (much less as a rule), traveling mostly for musical reasons, but also pausing to live in Leipzig, Lisbon and the Basque district of Spain. In 3 years Ian Wadley has made tens of thousands of photographs (ranging from ’serious photography’ to tourist snaps) since buying the first of three Contax i4R cameras, days before leaving to go on a brief tour..
Room To Live Again is, in part, a reconsideration of an earlier (and similar) exhibition Room To Live (Arch Lane, 1989) which in turn was inspired by the Fall album of the same name (lampooning as it does the WW2 Nazi expansionist policy of that name). It is also, in some ways, a response to the current rent crisis as much as it is an attempt to redefine notions of an “artist residency”.

THE RECONSTRUCTION PROJECT: THE INEVITABLE BEGINNING | dimple…)

The Reconstruction Project (2002-current) is an on-going exercise in and an exploration of a cultural/existentially deconstructed subject who attempts to reconstruct their identity through structures present within language which provide boundaries of understanding. In this current project the artist/subject traces back to her liminal attempts to conceptualise, realise and understand elements of this project and of her identity by creating conceptual diagrams (aka = brain maps, ideas maps, concept maps). Conceptual diagrams are commonly used to demonstrate of ideas, concepts, theories, to clarify concepts, to theorise. In this case the artist attempts to find clarity… clarity in her identity by conceptualising through several demonstrative diagrams which become obsessive because one is never suffice. How one is defined, never ends in this place because one is in a state of continual reconstruction, recreation, and revaluation, faced with countless cultural possibilities, translations and interpretations. Being lost in translation is a reality. I am investigating this space in my project between my pluralistic position through a these diagrams. What is understood is only understood in the moment. Clarity is temporal…