Slow Dance by Shay Minster opening tonight at West Space

Slow Dance
West Space
Shay Minster
Opening: Thursday February 18, 6-8pm

Image: Shay Minster

Exhibition runs from February 19 to March 13, 2010

Free Artist Talk: Thursday March 11, 12.30-1.30pm Gallery 3

“The Slow Dance exhibition examines the tragic comedy of the human condition. Appearing familiar and amusing at first, the project explores the suppression experienced when a personality is radically altered through the manipulation of their environment. A clown motif – drained of its usual high colour and its joyous free dance restricted – flails about in a futile attempt to fulfill its intended purpose. Stuck in endless repetition, Slow Dance confronts, in an absurd manner, the existential vacuum”.

Addition and Erasure
VCA- Margaret Lawrence Gallery
Opening Thursday 18 February 6–8pm
Exhibition runs from February 19 to March 20, 2010

Artists/participants: Luke Beesley, Michael Farrell, Doug Heslop, Helen Johnson, Margaret Mahem, Peter O’Mara, Simon Pericich. Curators: Luke Beesley and Doug Heslop

Image: Luke Beesley

“This project will represent a collaboration between a number of artists and poets and will engage a between space – ‘addition and erasure’ – as a conceptual beginning for an artwork. Addition and Erasure includes participants and works that locate language and/or text somewhere between contemporary art and poetry, as a strategy for illuminating the question or place of the author, reader, spectator or critic; and as a way of challenging easy categorisation. Some of the questions the exhibition aims to raise include: Is text a limited medium? How can poetry exist alongside contemporary art practice?  Where might the gallery and the page meet? Can they be made identical? More specifically, perhaps: Can ‘poets’ and ‘artists’ be critiqued in a single breath?”