THE CRANNY
4-19 August 2017
What am I doing?
Why are you here?
Rosie Thomas
Artist Talks: Saturday 19 August 3-5pm
Time is problematic. It is a measurement of distance. A non-solid that fills a space. What am I doing? Why are you here? proposes a disorientation of ones self in a non-space. Here the artist intersects the real and the invented and invites her audience to be actively self-reflexive. The artist negotiates the moments of failure associated an unsustainable and only partially accessible poetic time-associated materiality.
Essay
How often do you come here? How long will you be staying? What smoke fills up the caverns of your absence when you’re not around, occupying the new spaces your disappearance creates?
Somewhere between embodiment and disembodiment, hermit crabs and upturned buckets, breath-holding and fumigation. You are attending abandoned conferences, meeting missed deadlines and expanding endlessly into vaulted rooms like Alice in her too-small house.
Houses are important—homes too. Where can you rest amid the urgency? Nothing will wait for the pouring of your concrete foundations, your weatherboard or your thick, woolly insulation. Time will trample over you as you trample through it. There is cross-contamination. Things don’t bleed into each other—they spurt and spray and cross paths sharply. How often do you tell the whole truth?
What am I doing? Why are you here? features new multi-media work from artist Rosie Thomas, nestled between sincerity and falsehood. Her practice privileges the multitudinous conscious and subconscious rhythms of everyday life and requires her audience to consider the same. Narrative conceptions of time are disrupted and fold in on themselves in new, discomfiting patterns.
The audiovisual and photo-sculptural alike are here used to relocate temporal certainty within the realm of doubt and duplicity. The artist seeks out contradiction, self-reference and the unreliability of sensory memory. It is a precarious exercise, indulging ambivalence and unease. Thomas nevertheless performs with a steady hand.
This is a cry in the dark—not an anxious wail but a sure, smirking scream. Somewhere between chaos and meditation.
Joseph Brennan
Image: Rosie Thomas, What am I doing? Why are you here? (detail), 2017, Installation. Image courtesy of the artist.
AirSpace Projects 2014-2017 