Artist
Lou Conboy
Curator
Mark Shorter
Exhibition
2 October 2020 – The Cut closing event and An Unsteady Compass opening event – 2x free ticketed sessions: 5.30 – 6.20pm and 6.30 – 7.20pm
Bookings essential (limited spaces)
https://www.eventbrite.com.au/e/120493119163
Continues until 18 October 2020
Location: Contemporary Art Tasmania
A suite of three solo exhibitions curated by three artists presented in ‘rapid fire’ succession across three consecutive Fridays.
An Unsteady Compass is the second presentation in the Circumbinary orbits suite of exhibitions.
Presenting artist Lou Conboy and curating artist Mark Shorter have considered how we navigate the mythologies that have been written over the top of a landscape. Sited in the isolated mining town of Queenstown on the West Coast of Tasmania An Unsteady Compass questions the frontier legends that have shaped its culture. To chart this path Lou Conboy deploys her alter-ego Sisyphina, a figure first introduced in her eponymously titled show at Mona Foma in 2018. In this second chapter Sisyphean cyclic futility is turned inward to critique frontier myths and the bodies that have carried and inscribed them, like a palimpsest, onto invaded terrain.
The Circumbinary orbits suite is curated by Kylie Johnson and deals with sentience, trust, mortality, decay and mythology. The project is developed through the Artist-to-Artist model, first undertaken at CAT in 2016. Johnson employs curatorship as a means of enabling and shaping the social relationships through which art is generated. Informed by the unique relationships artists have with other artists, this project sets out to consider how the personal and professional proximities between artists intersect and influence exhibition outcomes. Each artist pairing has been derived from deliberation of the value that one artist may bring to the other while trusting in ‘gut instinct’ that constructive and supportive relationships will emerge. With a non-hierarchical approach and emphasis on peer-to-peer collaboration, Circumbinary orbits converges artist methodologies, techniques and approaches to artwork presentation.
Lou Conboy is from nipaluna/ Tasmania. Using video, photography and sculpture she documents gestures that explore themes relating to impermanence, absurdity, conjuring, grief, the uncanny and decay.
Mark Shorter is a performance and installation artist based in Melbourne. His work questions dominant narratives around landscape, gender and the body by stretching and turning the ideologies that sit deep in their form to see what bends or breaks.
Circumbinary orbits has been supported by DarkLab.
Lou Conboy developed An Unsteady Compass while in residence at Q Bank Gallery, Queenstown, Tasmania.
Image credit: Lou Conboy, An Unsteady Compass, production still, 2020. Photo Mark Shorter