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MASATO TAKASAKA
02.02.12 – 10.03.12

ALMOST EVERYTHING ALL AT ONCE, TWICE, THREE TIMES (IN FOUR PARTS...) *works from the permanent collection and selected loans from the EVERYTHING ALWAYS ALREADY-MADE STUDIO MASATOTECTURES MUSEUM OF FOUND REFRACTIONS (1994-2012)

Gertrude Contemporary is pleased to present a major solo project by Melbourne-based artist Masato Takasaka.  Takasaka’s sculptural practice takes the riff, reference, collage and re-working of the ready-made as a starting point, and he will for the first time, configure a new site-specific solo project for the Gertrude main gallery spaces.  This project will bring together work from across his practice, comprising new and re-worked sculptural forms, where Takasaka will act as artist and curator of his accumulative and ongoing retrospective project entitled,
the EVERYTHING ALWAYS ALREADY-MADE STUDIO MASATOTECTURES MUSEUM OF FOUND REFRACTIONS (1994-ongoing).

Occupying the entire main gallery, the exhibition will take the form of a series of pavilions or up-scaled maquettes, casting an alternative armature for viewing smaller sculptural works housed within. Takasaka employs the larger structure to ask the question, does the artwork support the structure or does the structure support the artwork?
 
Takasaka’s continued interest in building as form takes further inspiration from Marcel Duchamps’s portable museum, Boîte-en-valise (1935-41) as his impetus for the Gertrude iteration of his ongoing retrospective sculptural project. Taking his cues from Duchamp, Takasaka will be constructing his own mini-museum retrospective within the Gertrude main gallery space, reconfiguring and extending older works in an attempt, as Duchamp did, to avoid repeating himself or replicating his own work. Takasaka’s interest in accumulated histories and the ways in which an artistic practice can operate as a series of fragments, catch-phrases and obfuscations will be embellished within the exhibition.

Takasaka’s practice jams together modernist abstraction with the ready-made, blending it and extending it as a comment on the art historical adage that ‘nothing is ever new’.  More recently Takasaka has been looking at 1980s Japanese Shopfront design with its myriad of art historical references and diorama-like forms. As a function of this research, and central to the exhibition, is the concept that as Takasaka states, the ‘display will be on display’. Re-configuring the main gallery space and employing the materials of architectural models Takasaka’s meta-structure both supports and obscures a series of re-worked sculptures housed within it.

Masato Takasaka (b. 1977, Melbourne) studied at the Victorian College of the Arts, Melbourne graduating with a Bachelor of Fine Art (Hons) in 1999, and a Bachelor of Fine Art in Drawing, in 1998. He is currently undertaking a PhD at the Faculty of Art and Design at Monash University. Recent solo exhibitions include Post-Structural Jam (Shut Up! We know you can play!…), Metro Arts, Brisbane 2010 and Y3K Gallery, Melbourne 2009; From the edge of insanity, SNO Contemporary Art Projects, Sydney, 2008. Recent group exhibitions include NETWORKS (cells and silos), Monash University Museum of Art, Melbourne, 2011; New Psychedelia, The University of Queensland Art Museum, Brisbane, 2011; Post-logical Form, Contemporary Art Centre of South Australia, Adelaide, 2011; READY OR NOT IT’S 2010, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, California, 2010; Cubism and Australian Art, Heide Museum of Modern Art, Melbourne, 2010. As part of the artists’ group Inverted Topology he was included in + Plus Factors, Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, Melbourne 2006; at SNO, Sydney, 2007; and Minus Space at PS1 Contemporary Art Centre, New York, 2009.Takasaka is Creative Director at STUDIO MASATOTECTURES and teaches in the Interior Design Program at the School of Architecture and Design, RMIT University. He has lived the dream playing lead guitar in the late 90′s with Teenwolf, Van Newton, and Stonehenge Vaccums (with Christopher L.G Hill). He continues to live the prog rock dream making noise on the guitar and keyboard with no-wave astro-gaze prog-punk band Ana Nicole.

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TOM POLO

GESTURES AND MISTAKES
03.02.12 – 10.03.12

Tom Polo’s work takes inspiration from the performance of anxiety. Exploring, exaggerating and mocking moments of self-reflection, self-sabotage, self-help, self-indulgence and self-aggrandising, and he pushes self-doubt towards its cringe-worthy limits.

Building on several projects staged in 2011 whilst in residence at Acme Studios, London, Polo’s first project at Gertrude Contemporary will occupy the Front Gallery space and comprise a wall-painting and an accompanying site-specific sound-scape.

Playing on the Gallery’s street frontage and stage-like structure, Polo will further explore the wall painting as a performance of working and re-working of a problem where the site, materials and scale operate in opposition. Polo intends to ‘solve’ and ‘re-solve’ the painting, which will remain in continuous flux throughout the exhibition period. Perhaps exemplifying why a work should not extend beyond the canvas, Polo’s wall-drawing attempts to thwart expectation and forces the work beyond resolution, into chaos or failure. Working against artistic modes of production, presentation, and encounter, this new work intends to deliberately spoil the spectacle for the viewer, which will exist as evidence of an obliterated and over-painted work that obscures a completed original.

With works entitled, “Understudy”, “Disappointed in Everything (it happens)”, and “SELF SABBO TAGE/Maybe One Day”, Polo’s practice is the evidence of anxious artistic production.  Polo is interested in pitting the language and tone of self-help and motivational speaking against the idea of art work as a laboured-over, balanced and complete ornament.

Tom Polo lives and works in Sydney. In 2011 he undertook the Australia Council London Studio Residency and held his first international solo exhibition at Acme Project Space, London. Polo completed a Bachelor of Fine Arts (Honours) at the College of Fine Arts, UNSW. In 2007 he was awarded a studio residency at Parramatta Artists Studios and held his first solo exhibition, An Excessive Aesthetic at Firstdraft Gallery, Sydney. Since then, Polo has exhibited in numerous exhibitions at Gallery 9 (2007), Campbelltown Arts Centre (2009), Perth Institute of Contemporary Art (2009) and Grantpirrie (2011). He is the recent recipient of the Art and Australia/Credit Suisse Contemporary Art Award and is currently completing a Masters of Fine Arts at the College of Fine Arts, UNSW.