Artist Talk: Saturday 10th March 2012, 3.30 – 4.30pm
Gallery open: Monday 12noon – 5.00pm, Tuesday – Saturday 10am – 5.00pm and Sundays 10am – 4.00pm (4th, 11th & 18th March) – Artists will be making art the gallery space on Sundays
Disconnect/Reconnect/Revisited is a collective exhibition commenting on the social constructs of how identity is viewed and interpreted.
Social construction is dependent on contingent variables of our social selves, which is reinforced through more social constructs. Within the folds of social construction is identity: personal identity, social and cultural identity and identity of place. It is the expression of identity through the eyes of the artist that is experienced in Disconnect/Reconnect/Revisited. Through a process of disengaging with the self, each artist re-examines identity from an altered perspective, challenging the predetermined and contrived social filters that identity is viewed through.
Whether the methods are through painted self portraits in an abstracted view of the self; or the process of character reconstruction and deconstruction of alter-egos through self portrait photography or the method of installation that comments on the feelings of the other, the alien each artist has gone through a method of withdrawal from their own identity and re-examining this identity from an altered perspective, challenging the pr-determined and contrived social filters that identity is viewed through.
Sin-Mae’s body of work looks at the idea of morphing through a process of repetitive self portraits. By repetition and re-examination of the own image, dissecting strokes and colour, the image becomes process driven, unrecognisable and detached from the original form.
Debbie Stenzel’s two video works talks of a time in her life when there is an invisible line between reality and her reality. Disconnected from ‘normal’ society, Stenzel’s work talks how people exist in different states but must continue to function within the normal space of society.
Artist Selene Simcox transfers impressions from surfaces in her environment where the remaining footprint left in paint, explores how identity translates meaning and significance of places and their inhabitants.
Utilising photography, artist Rachael Garvey explores the stereo-typical trappings of gender identity by impersonating numerous imagined and contrived male alter-egos.
