Exhibition

05.03.04 - 27.03.04
Main Gallery
Pandarosa, Organic, Moth, Kongzilla and Abbatoir. Curated by Pandarosa.
Continuum Sombrous
Presented in association with the 2004 L'Oreal Melbourne Fashion Festival, Arts Program

For the 2004 L’Oreal Melbourne Fashion Festival, Gertrude presents an exciting installation project curated by Pandarosa, one of Melbourne’s most innovate, experimental and cutting-edge design collectives.

For Continuum Sombrous, Pandarosa have invited several other noted Melbourne artists and designers to produce an installation which will completely envelop the gallery space, engulfing the viewer in a evocative, walk-through magazine environment which stretches across two – three- and four-dimensional forms.

Collaborators include:
• Moth, aka Melbourne-based Kate Hannaford, who creates knitted webs and woven materials which ensnare and envelop the objects, and people, they are designed for.
• Abbatoir, aka Julia Burrell, whose taxidermy-based jewellery and uncanny installation work toys unsettlingly with ideas of life and death.
• Organic, whose video projection and digital print work fuses real and constructed environments, overlaying actual footage with animation and hand-drawn elements until real and fake become confused and blurred.

Investigating and reinventing the aesthetic and conventions of the gothic tradition, the installation will provide a contemporary take on the ideas and forms of a movement which has existed across centuries.

Inspired by the illuminated manuscripts of the middle ages, Pandarosa explain that "the technique of ‘illumination’ contrived to release the ‘light’ or ‘truth’ within a text. In the age of hypertext, billboards and neon signs, light itself distorts the value of the truth, deceiving the observer. We want to use these ideas as a means to transform and alter the meaning and perception of the work within the gallery space."