The Dawn Of R_A_M / Sacred Predictions / Spirit Of Enterprise

1 September – 18 September

The Dawn Of R_A_M – Karla Pringle

“We are in the future, The Chimpanzees, through some fault of humanity, are now the dominant species. They have not yet discovered electricity but have a culture that is remarkably similar to humans at the end of the middle ages. Museums and the exotic are particularly fashionable and the Chimpanzees have created museum-like environments to display discoveries from their recent geological endeavours. The dawn of R.A.M. is a window onto a time from long ago, possibly around the late 20th century. There are no reliable or readable records from this time, but there is a plethora of found materials. The Chimpanzees have arranged these to the best of their knowledge in an attempt to reconstruct a long lost civilisation.

We don’t really know how long it’s going to last (plastics) because it’s so new, … so maybe in a few hundred thousand years that stuff is going to disintegrate. Plastics are the newest hydrocarbon on the block… like when the first trees appeared on Earth made out of lignin. Microbes had never seen lignin before and it took them a long time to learn how to digest it so the first trees, instead of decaying, they just got buried and eventually became our coal bearing layers. Plastics, same thing; until microbes learn how to eat the stuff, perhaps hundreds of thousands of years will go by and a lot of it will enter the geological record. “  Alan Weisman, Author, The World Without Us, Interview, 13/6/09, ABC Radio National.

It’s the monkey in me that made me want to do it”. Starstruck, 1982.

Sacred Predictions – Rebecca Adams

Constructing versions of nature and the ‘natural’, Sacred Predictions looks at mythologies of the feminine performed in social ritual and cultural rites of passage. Alongside a documentary style video performance, an intricate sculptural installation employs floriography (the Victorian language of flowers), and a DIY aesthetic via homely craft techniques. The successes and failures of the works’ attempts at realism betray a curious unnaturalness, reflective of the imposition of romantic ideals of the ‘natural’ upon nature and gender.

Spirit Of Enterprise – Torika Bolatagici

Coco Fusco writes that from the 18th Century, texts have “reduced people of colour to the corporeal, whiteness was understood as a spirit that manifests itself in a dynamic relation to the physical world. Whiteness, then, does not need to be made visible to present an image; it can be expressed as the spirit of enterprise, as the power to organise the material world, and as an expansive relation to the environment.”

This work asks where black and white bodies fit within this new economy of war…who is visible and who is invisible? Whose bodies are commodities and who embodies the spirit of enterprise?