Exhibition04.07.08 - 02.08.08
Cormack’s exhibition Octopus 8: The softness in the rock: hope in disappointing times brings together work by artists from Australia, the USA and New Zealand who monumentalise small moments and processes. Employing video, sculpture, installation and photography, the works question ideas of success or ‘event’, commemorating faith in the face of disappointment and examining human urges for optimism. The works in the exhibition include a video work by American artist Gary Simmons, in which he documents a sky writer’s fruitless attempts to paint a snow storm in the sky over the Arizona desert. Other works include a garlanded, celebratory bridge that extends from a dying tree by Eleanor Avery; hanging Perspex globular forms that remove the viewer into an infinite and alienating environment by Kiron Robinson; and an attempt to understand tomorrow through plotting and recreating the solar system with electrical circuits by Hanna Tai. The Softness in the Rock draws on postcolonial readings of public monuments as ‘blind spots’ that essentially conceal or pin-hole events. The works in this show renegotiate the role of the monument and instead become celebrations of a hopeful hopelessness and a cynical optimism. The exhibition will combine an atmosphere of slightly self-deprecating or parochial humble pride with embarrassingly grandiose commemorations of ‘effort’. But the whole will be spun on a central appreciation of process and the search for significance.
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Octopus is Gertrude’s annual flagship exhibition, which charts new directions in contemporary curatorial practice. This year Octopus is curated by
GCAS Curator Emily Cormack.