Not For Entertainment
Few exhibitions in recent memory, save perhaps 2007's Turbulence Triennial, have self-consciously assembled work that is so hard to look at, so challenging to think about, and so necessary. Doris Salcedo once said of her work that: 'As an artist, I don't have the opportunity to choose the themes that inform a piece. The oft-celebrated freedom of the artist is a myth.'
- Opening Date: Tuesday, 8 May 2012
- Closing Date: Sunday, 27 May 2012
- Opening Time: Tues to Fri 11-6pm, Sat 11-4pm
Artists include: Andy Leleisi'uao, Ross Ritchie, Niki
Hastings-McFall, Pete Wheeler, Lauren Lysaght, and Locust Jones
The artists that make up Whitespace Gallery's Not For
Entertainment - Andy Leleisi'uao, Ross Ritchie, Niki
Hastings-McFall, Pete Wheeler, Lauren Lysaght, and Locust Jones -
share the impetus to create works that confront realities that we
wish were not real. Lysaght's miniature hearses lose no
elaborateness to their scale, and Hasting-McFall's tiny tomb
breathes an optimistic breath into her version of a burial.
Jones' ink drawing recalls Picasso's Guernica, while
Ritchie and Wheeler offer modernised momento
mori. Leleisi'uao slight sculptures, though
unsettling, are themselves born of an awareness of a reality that
must be addressed.
Not For Entertainment draws together a group of artists
that are all engaged in a startling project - creating works that
confront their own realities as artists (and humans), while
reminding viewers that we are not immune to these realities.
The prospect - and likewise the exhibition - is challenging: this
is not for entertainment.
Amy Stewart
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