Gallery Two

Fiona Hooton

Site Seeing

3-18 June 2016

Fiona Hooton will be participating in the Artist Talks Saturday 18 June 2016, 2-5pm. Talks will be followed by tea and casual conversation with the exhibiting June artists.

Fiona Hooton, Code Box, 2016, digital print on acrylic, 500x500mm

The works in Site Seeing are models assembled from found, toy-building blocks and sampled fragments of film. They are constructed impressions of cities, their nightly romantic spectacle and their mortgage belts and housing bubbles.

Architecture it is said, ‘is the most political of all the art forms’. I live in a model city, Canberra. A city synonymous with architecture and politics, Canberra is frequently described as lacking a heart and soul.

I am fascinated by the shared metaphors of bodies and cities, their bypasses and arterial roads. You can trace these metaphors back to William Harvey’s dangerous discovery in 1628, that it is the heart, which functions to circulate the blood and not the soul. Interestingly, Christopher Wren, the famous English architect did many of the drawings for Harvey’s publication De Motu Cordis, Concerning the Motion of the Heart and Blood.

If you peel back the skin of the city the structure of the grid is revealed. The grid has fleshed out human achievement through time and space from the brick to the tablet, longitude to the World Wide Web and typeface to cloud space.

By 2050, 75% of the world’s population will be living in cities. As Paolo Baratta, President of la Biennale Architettura di Venezia 2016 describes, ‘much of this immense swathe of human habitation no human could be proud of’.

But cities exist as a function of the circulation of people and the circuitry of information. Probing the question, can we create a model of the city in which we as dwellers can influence its values as well as its forms?

http://www.fionahooton.com.au/

Fiona Hooton’s exhibition coincides with her one-month residency at the Inner West Council’s Thirning Villa in Ashfield. Fiona will be undertaking a number of projects while in residence. Please check our Workshops menu for details.