Exhibition

10.03.06 - 08.04.06
Main Gallery
Grudge Match: Game On
Alex Davies vs Angelica Mesiti, Matthew Tumbers vs Gotaro Uematsu, Bennett Miller vs Pete Volich. Curated by Tania Doropoulos.
Presented as a part of Next Wave 2006.

Imagine an arena. A grand event… Artists battling. Art against art. Artist against artist. Art against artist. Art against sport in a contemporary Australian climate. An art event to coincide with a Commonwealth Games.

For Grudge Match, young curator Tania Doropoulos has paired six artists together, to battle each other via artistic intervention. The selected artists have developed new artworks in opposition or collaboration with each other in an explosive space, where concepts and aesthetics are faced off in a creatively challenging environment. This process effectively turns the artist’s studio into a sporting arena, where two artistic positions fight for dominance, or two voices seek synergy through collaboration.

Grudge Match considers the politics of sport and art, and the production and reception of both in contemporary Australia: the way sport is inherently dominant in our culture, and how as a cultural tool, art locates a position amongst a broader Australian audience.

Grudge Match exists somewhere between competition and collaboration - between the practice of one artist and another. It considers the shifts between individualism and collectivism, the disciplines of the lives of artists and the lives of athletes, the ideas of the watchers against the watched, the leaders against the followers and the athlete/artist as spectacle. The resulting exhibition explodes into the space, occupying the walls, floor, ceiling and in-between spaces of Gertrude’s Main Gallery with an intensely playful energy. Grudge Match: Game On is the fourth in a series of exhibitions by emerging curators at Gertrude Contemporary Art Spaces. Presented in association with the 2006 Next Wave Festival. Grudge Match: Game On is supported by ArtsWA and NAVA.