Elastic: An Archive Project — 12 to 29 October 2005
Artist curated.
12 to 29 October 2005.
Participating artists: Lisa Andrew, Hany Armanious, Stuart Bailey, Jay Balbi, Joanna Callaghan, Liz Day, Deej Fabyc, Ian Geraghty, Sarah Goffman, Kathryn Gray & Holly Williams, Ross Harley, Mark Hislop, Emily Hunt, Andrew Hurle, Melanie Khava, Claire Lambe, Sally Mannall, Elvis Richardson, Tobias Richardson, Raquel Ormella, Luke Parker, Elizabeth Pulie, Mary Teague, Regina Walters.
Opened by Susan Charlton, Creative Producer, State Records NSW (State Government Archives), 15 October 2005.
Read Susan Charlton’s talk > Download pdf
Elastic is a group of nine artists who create projects that invite other artists to participate with a view to expanding the scope and interpretation of a project. This democratising curatorial model allows unexpected outcomes.
The Elastic: Archive Project displays, in various forms, the collecting and classifying activities that engage these artists’ practices as both research and raw material. Classifying systems are fundamental not only to public and private collection activities but relate, in a gallery context, to the manufacture of authenticity within the art-culture system. This exhibition explores this operation by placing private studio process in the lived context of the gallery space.
The resulting archival categories range from fantastic or absolutely bloody useless catalogues of vernacular objects or adornments, to straight-faced empirical research into, for example, the reasons given by an arts council for rejecting a grant application or under-representation of women artists in contemporary criticism. The archive even has its own exhibition reviews.
Draw your own conclusions with regard to the authenticity of the artists’ interpretations of material and museum culture!
From a historical perspective the Elastic: Archive Project harnesses conceptual and process art’s critical forces as well as more recent methodological innovations using analytical techniques appropriated from interdisciplinary and institutional critique. Out of these parameters a new direction in contemporary art has emerged. The emphasis is on the formal experiments of individual artists. In this way and by these means, contemporary life and issues of the marginal or unfashionable can be given prominence.