INNOVATORS 1 - AN IDEAL FOR LIVING

Hannah Bertram, Iris Fischer, Briele Hansen, Sanné Mestrom, Susan Milne, Anna-Maria O'Keeffe, Jessica Page, Izabela Pluta, Julia Silvester, Camilla Tadich, Louiseann Zahra-King

Curated by Simon Gregg

14 March - 13 April 2008

An Ideal for Living is the first of the Innovators Program 2008 series of exhibitions. The exhibition follows the trajectory of decay and impermanence within contemporary Australian art. Curated by Simon Gregg, author of a forthcoming book on the Romantic sublime in contemporary Australian art, An Ideal for Living draws together a wide range of works from eleven artists, united by their concerns for the life and death of the object, memory, transitional space, and longing and absence.

An Ideal for Living has been inspired, in part, by the work of UK cultural theorist Dylan Trigg, whose book 'The Aesthetics of Decay' sought to legitimise the ruin as complete in its fragmentation. This dynamic new exhibition proposes a 'domestic sublime' residual within the elegiac Linden environs, and borne out by the traces of living that remain as scars in its built fabric.

The title An Ideal for Living is inherently contradictory, for the works that comprise the exhibition document the accruements of everyday life - a myriad of components that infer the signs and transience of life - but presented in states of decay and ruination, torn from their functionality, and assembled as though a cemetery to the material culture of people.

While encompassing mortality within their study of life, the works achieve a harmony of domestic decorum. In the hands of Susan Milne we might encounter a vacuum cleaner or portable television, which has been made the reliquary of the hopes and dreams of the urbanite by being cast in solid concrete. Similarly Izabela Pluta, Louiseann Zahra-King and Hannah Bertram present us with fossilized household ornaments set in concrete, bronze and dust respectively, while Briele Hansen projects a dreamlike animation of Linden's interiors back on itself.

An Ideal for Living will be accompanied by a significant new publication featuring texts by Dylan Trigg and curator Simon Gregg, available exclusively through Linden from 30 March 2008.

For information and images please contact Jan Duffy 03 9209 6794 or info@lindenarts.org

 

 

 

INNOVATORS 1 - AN IDEAL FOR LIVING image: Izabela Pluta
image: Izabela Pluta


image: Hannah Bertram


image: Briele Hansen


image: Iris Fischer


image: Sanné Mestrom


image: Susan Milne


image: Anna-Maria O'Keeffe


image: Jessica Page


image: Izabela Pluta


image: Julia Silvester


image: Camilla Tadich


image: Louiseann Zahra-King