Five new exhibitions open at Linden
6pm Friday 2 July 2004

Bonbeach Bourgie Wourgie, in Gallery 1(front) , is a melancholic video and installation piece in which artist Jarrad Kennedy repeatedly draws and erases the text "Wreckless", onto the inside of an inner-city window. The work appropriates a logo from a console smash-em-up style game and accompanied it with the Australian Crawl ballad Reckless. The video self-consciously continues the tradition of films of artists working, in action, including art heroes such as Pollock and Picasso but in executing the work solely for the camera and then erasing it after so much care inevitably questions the value of such activities.

In Gallery 1(rear) Geneine Honey's video piece Falling comprises footage of a trapeze artist projected into a glass tank; the result is an optical illusion not dissimilar to a hologram. Accompanied by a remake of the Julie Cruz song Falling the ghostly image and the rhythmic movement of the trapeze artist creates a tension and explores the tragic dimensions of love that is synonymous with the character of the female circus performer throughout cinematic history.

Toni Wilkinson's sumptuous photographic prints in Tough Pleasures in Gallery 2 have an iconic quality that elevates the relationship that women have with food to an almost religious level. Her images reference traditions of portraiture where the subject is pictured in a favoured environment surrounded by symbolic objects that provide clues to her status or predilections. Though the work is highly staged the women are not cast as archetypes but as real contemporary individuals, frozen in contemplation of what comes across often as banally familiar - baked beans, jam doughnuts or a simple piece of fruit.

At the end of the day, by Anne Wilson in Galleries 3 & 5 is a lens and sound based installation, incorporating a projection of a figure repeatedly submerged in water. The work aims to challenge reductionism and to explore the way in which over-saturation de-personalises the more complex and transformative issues relating to the body.

Naomie Sunner's exhibition Spare Parts in Gallery 4, investigates how medical science interferes with the relationship between our bodies and each other. The emerging technologies of cloning and genetic manipulation have great potential to create humans for specific purposes. The work of some biotechnologists, such as the creation of a headless chicken (designed to be fed through tubes directly down the gullet and consequently to solve the problem of battery chickens pecking each other to death) may in the future be applied to humans so that they can be bred for organ parts. With no face and no mind are they still human?

All exhibitions continue until Saturday 14 August 2004.
Gallery hours are Tuesday - Sunday 1.00pm - 6.00pm.

For further information and/or images please contact Jan Duffy on 9209 6794 or email info@lindenarts.org