2007
- Sarah Goffman @ Ocular Lab Inc
2005 - ELASTIC An Archive Project @ Cross Art Projects
Sydney
2003 - New York Calling - PS1 Australian
Studio New York
2002 - Mondo Cane2 @ LeRoy Neiman Gallery, Columbia
University New York
1997 - The Collector @ First Draft Gallery Sydney
Sarah Goffman @ Ocular
Lab Inc
Victoria!
Victoria!
A mixed media temporary
installation and video
(Under the cloak of the flag)
Saturday 7th
and Sunday 8th of April 12-5pm (ONLY!!!!)
opening Sat 3pm
31 Pearson Street
Brunswick West
Sarah Goffman collects, collates, assembles and embellishes the
materials of Art Provera; like cardboard, rubberbands, cut up images
and text, found objects, aluminum foil, glass and inventive lighting.
She creates idiosynchratic arrangements of her objects that add
a certain beauty yet rawness to the archive of the sublime, while
turning any passive assumptions of looking into spaces of doing
and action.
Come and see Victoria! Ruminations on the Victoria and Albert Museum
in London, and all things Victorian!
Sarah Goffman is a Sydney based artist whose installations and objects
have most recently been exhibited at the Museum of Contemporary
Art, Sydney, Artspace Sydney, Canberra Contemporary Artspace and
Hazelhurst Regional Gallery. Sarah was the editor in 2006 with Elvis
Richardson of Photofile #78 - "The Archive Issue" and
is a founding member of Elastic Projects.
ELASTIC An Archive Project
Lisa Andrew, Hany
Armanious, Stuart Bailey, Jay Balbi, Joanna Callaghan, Liz Day,
Deej Fabyc, Ian Geraghty, Sarah Goffman, Kathryn Gray & Holly
Williams, Ross Harley, Mark Hislop, Emily Hunt, Andrew Hurle, Melanie
Khava, Claire Lambe, Sally Mannall, Elvis Richardson, Tobias Richardson,
Raquel Ormella, Luke Parker, Elizabeth Pulie, Mary Teague, Regina
Walter
Curated by Elvis Richardson, Sarah Goffman & Lisa Andrew
VIEW
exhibition WEBSITE
You are invited to the opening
BY SUSAN CHARLTON
CREATIVE PRODUCER STATE RECORDS NSW (STATE GOVERNMENT ARCHIVES)
SATURDAY 15 OCTOBER 4-–6PM
The Cross Art Projects
A space for independent art & curatorial studies
33 Roslyn Street Kings Cross Sydney 2011
T: (02) 93572058 | e: joholder@aic.net.au
w: crossart.com.au
Exhibition continues until 29 October 2005
Wed–Sat 11–6PM
The Cross Art Projects
33 Roslyn Street Kings Cross Sydney (opposite St Luke’s Hospital
gates)
---------
CROSS CONVERSATION WITH THE ARTISTS: SATURDAY 22 OCTOBER, 4PM
---------
ELASTIC is a group of nine artists who create projects that invite
other artists to participate with a view to expanding the scope
and interpretation of a project. This democratising curatorial model
allows unexpected outcomes.
The Elastic: Archive Project displays, in various forms, the collecting
and classifying activities that engage these artists’ practices
as both research and raw material. Classifying systems are fundamental
not only to public and private collection activities but relate,
in a gallery context, to the manufacture of authenticity within
the art-culture system. This exhibition explores this operation
by placing private studio process in the lived context of the gallery
space.
The resulting archival categories range from fantastic or absolutely
bloody useless catalogues of vernacular objects or adornments, to
straight-faced empirical research into, for example, the reasons
given by an arts council for rejecting a grant application or under-representation
of women artists in contemporary criticism. The archive even has
its own exhibition reviews.
Draw your own conclusions with regard to the authenticity of the
artists’ interpretations of material and museum culture!
From a historical perspective the Elastic Archive Project harnesses
conceptual and process art’s critical forces as well more
recent methodological innovations using analytical techniques appropriated
from interdisciplinary and institutional critique. Out of these
parameters a new direction in contemporary art has emerged. The
emphasis is on the formal experiments of individual artists. In
this way and by these means, contemporary life and issues of the
marginal or unfashionable can be given prominence.
The Archive Project is the latest Elastic ‘edition’.
Artwork editions are available exclusively for the exhibition.
----------
ELASTIC
Elastic’s prior projects include running an eponymous shop-front
gallery in Chippendale (for 6 months in 2000), Caravan a survey
style show at Free Space (2002) and the publication of the celebrated
Elastic: A Printed Project in 2004. Last year, Elastic moved off-shore
to establish Elastic Artist Residence in Whitechapel, London, curated
by Deej Fabyc as a gallery space for projects and durational performance.
----------
Supported by City of Sydney Council for Kings Cross Arts Festival
2005: www.kxarts.com
Mondo
Cane II
curated
by Elvis Richardson and Sally-Ann Rowland
Derrick
Adams, Kristopher Benedict, Tony Chirinos, Jon Conner, Anna Conway,
Jacob Dyrenforth, Chitra Ganesh, Hilary Harnischfeger, Stephen Hilger,
Mark Hislop, Jon Kessler, Andrew Kromelow, Ignosio Lang, Alexander
Lee, Greg Martin, Lisi
Raskin, Elvis
Richardson, Halsey
Rodman, Andrew
Rogers, Sally-Ann
Rowland, Marco
Santos, Mika
Tajima, Elif
Uras,
Mondo
Cane II,
curated by Elvis Richardson and Sally-Ann Rowland, was presented
at the LeRoy Neiman Center for Print Studies in New York, April
2002. The exhibition drew works from twenty-four artists together
to provide a cacophony of information suggestive of the unmanageable
size of the world and the failure inherent in the desire to capture.
The
work was displayed in a concentrated area of the gallery: two corner
walls and a low platform at the far end of the space. The majority
of the space remained empty. The exhibition area was delineated
by a heavy yellow paint that drew the works together and created
a pictorial space amongst which viewers were invited to walk.
Mondo
Cane II evolved in concept and execution from the exhibition Mondo
Cane curated by Mark Hislop, at Herringbone Gallery, Sydney,
Australia, in 1998. The titles reference the Italian director Gualtiero
Jacopetti's 1962 documentary, Mondo Cane. This documentary
is a collection of purportedly real footage of cultural practices
around the world: the more shocking and unusual a scene the better.
The film coined the term "shockumentary" and firmly situated
the spectacle in the realm of bad behavior. Jacopetti's camera undermined
documentary objectivity, producing a slippage between truth and
exploitation as he rubbed subject matters against one another, creating
a new benchmark of juxtaposition.
The
Mondo Cane exhibitions used the believe-it-or-not museum aspect
of the Mondo Cane documentary as a means of presenting
art in an unconventional and engaging manner. The artworks in these
exhibitions are not the jewels on velvet cushions of conventional
gallery presentation. The works are too numerous, they encroach
on each other's personal space and are presented anywhere above,
below and to the side of "eye-level".
The
deep yellow ground in Mondo Cane II further dismantled
the expectation of exhibition spaces as neutral white cubes. The
color was chosen for its anticipated competition with the works'
themselves and its association with heavily decorated ethnographic
displays. The dominance created by the concentration of artworks
and the yellow ground produced the unequal balance of activity and
neglect, stage and audience, that operates in theatrical spaces.
Mondo Cane II's feature walls and platform hold an excess of artwork,
confronting the viewer with an overload of sensual information reminiscent
of patchwork quilts and wall murals. This "democratizing"
display levels identities, reputations and qualitative artwork judgments.
Questions of taste take second fiddle to intent as a whole, loud
works sit quietly among others, as do stars among the unknown. Employing
the associative structure of the Mondo Cane documentary,
each artwork is brought into relation with those beside it, previously
discrete objects becoming units of unanticipated narratives.
The
Mondo Cane documentary has faded into history. It was not
insightful, much of the footage was staged and it suffered from
the dull opposition of "primitive" and "civilized"
that has plagued anthropological practices. It managed however,
to produce a spate of sequels: Mondo Cane 2, Mondo New York,
and Mondo Rio.
By
bringing structural elements of these films into a fine art context,
the Mondo Cane exhibitions sought to use these films as a means
to expose and transform conventional exhibition viewing. The display
de-neutralizes the gallery space, bringing questions of consumer
marketing, privileged histories and political agendas into the often
casual experience of viewing an exhibition.
NEW
YORK CALLING
Part Proposition / Part Declaration
