22 March – 15 April 2023
Opening Wednesday, 22 March from 6:00pm
October 1935
Aliyah Winter
October 1935 takes its name from the first poem of the series Six Memorials by Ursula Bethell. These poems are a mourning for the woman Bethell called her consort, Effie Pollen, written on anniversaries of Pollen’s passing. While they lived together for 30 years, they were careful about their relationship in public.
October 1935 enacts a private ritual of mourning that works with and against language, and the demands of intelligibility. Taking up a constellation of references, the work plays with obscurity as a poetic strategy and a kind of shield, embracing Tiffany Page’s concept of a vulnerable methodology. Page writes in relation to the ethics of telling the stories of others: “as well as exposing the fragility of knowledge assembly, a vulnerable methodology might be closely positioned with questioning what is known, and what might come from an opening in not knowing.”
22 March – 15 April 2023
Opening Wednesday, 22 March from 6:00pm
Tropical Debris
Juliana Durán
The tropics have long been associated with exoticism, lushness, and excess. As Nancy Leys Stepan shows in Picturing Tropical Nature, “The ‘tropical’ came to constitute more than a geographical concept; it signified a place of radical otherness to the temperate world, with which it contrasted and which it helped constitute”.
Tropicality, although a concept that first appeared with colonisation, is deeply rooted in pre-hispanic ways of life, where resourcefulness and creativity were essential for survival. By embracing these values, these works pay homage to the real legacy of the tropics. Being exotic is not a quality of the object, person, or place itself, but rather a feeling or reaction that the observer experiences temporarily.
Tropical Debris is not only a collection of upcycled objects but also a statement of identity and a challenge to cultural assumptions and stereotypes associated with the concept of tropical. By giving new life to discarded materials, the pieces defy the absurdity of a society that often prioritizes waste over resourcefulness.
22 March – 15 April 2023
Opening Wednesday, 22 March from 6:00pm
Hot Wheels 3000
Sophie Sutherland
Hot Wheels 3000 invites participants to race an option of three remote control cars in Samoa House Lane, adjacent to RM gallery. This project is a sculptural and interaction conception of competition, expectation, play, and comradery. So, do you think you can drive?