Proposal for an exhibition of artworks – Inflight A.R.I - November 2012 

This is a proposal for a solo exhibition of artworks ranging across a variety of media including video, digital prints, assemblage and painting. The nature of this work would be experimental (departing from habitual concerns) and would seek to liberate and question the formal approaches of my work of the past several years. This is best explained by providing two rationales, one that captures conceptual concerns of recent work and one that proposes directions for new, experimental work.

A rationale for work I have already made:

My experience as a migrant to Tasmania includes dislocation, dissonance and a lack of deep connection with endemic narratives. My work as a visual artist utilises a tactic of infiltration and re-deployment of dominant narratives via the use of ‘minor languages’.

My methodology is to redistribute images taken from minor stories in local newspapers using the ambiguous language of painting. It locates their underlying structures and empties them of their plausible content. They become anecdotal.

This leads to a reimaging via painting as new, melodramatic departures from the original stories. The aim is to avoid detail that inhibits the process of imaginative engagement with story and consequently to perpetuate a state of continual re-reading.

This strategy aligns with my own migratory experience and with this community’s sense of worth in the face of a perceived peripheral status within a larger Australian context. A major focus is to ‘misread’ an already marginalised Tasmanian content, promoting it via the painted equivalent of operatic aggrandisement to a place of ‘big’ stories.

A rationale for the proposed experimental work:

The environment (the conditions in which a particular activity is carried on) that surrounds the work outlined above exists on two planes: firstly, the plane I find myself on defined and delimited by the word ‘Tasmania’; and secondly, the plane or territory of the artwork – it’s ambiguous location. The work that I propose to make for Inflight would be akin to artifacts and evidence brought back by an expeditionary team who have been exploring the uncharted territories of the stories of these planes.

 I imagine that in traversing these terrains with my expeditionary team I will form some kind of connection, although, as was the case on earlier colonial expeditions, with the limited resources at my disposal, I must consider what can feasibly be retrieved, brought back and conveyed to an audience, even if only partially. I must also consider the possibility that we will get lost, but that in this moment of disorientation, we will find our escape.

In summary, the proposal is to make artworks in a variety of media that:

·       are the remnants an exploration of the terrain of endemic narrative

·       do not seek to homogenise but rather, acknowledge dissonance and lack of connection

·       inhabit their place as the migrant inhabits theirs