Dream’n Wild
Minda Andrén (SW), Battle-ax and Daphne Ahlers (AU/DE), Andy Boot (AU), Bonita Bub (AU), Consuelo Cavaniglia (AU), Suzy Faiz (AU), Marita Fraser (AU/UK), Jennifer Katarina Gelardo (USA/DE), Manuel Gorkiewicz (AT), Sonia Leimer (IT), Angelika Loderer (AT), Christian Kosmas Mayer (DE), Jonny Niesche (AU), Nick Oberthaler (AT), Flavio Palasciano (IT), Lucia Elena Průša (DE), Alexander Jackson Wyatt (AU), Franz West (AT), Heimo Zobernig (AT)
July 21 - August 4, 2018
ALASKA PROJECTS
Level 2, Kings Cross Car Park
9A Elizabeth Bay Road
Elizabeth Bay
SYDNEY, Australia
Photos by Jessica Maurer
ALASKA Projects is pleased to host the group show Dream'n
Wild. This exhibition gathers together twentyone artists and writers, some
of whom are based in Vienna, Austria, and some in Sydney, Australia. There are
also included artists who work or have worked between both cities.
In a quixotic gesture of trying to engage a gallery
and its architecture as an impossible bridge connecting distinctly separate
locations, curator, Alexander Jackson Wyatt, has invited the contributing
artists to propose works that make possible or mark out such an imagined
connectivity. This would be in order to—or enable us to possibly—rethink how we
might otherwise connect two or more dislocated locales. Each of the
contributing artists works in specific ways on or between existing
environments, their systems and structures. Such environments may well be
pre-existing, under construction or imaginary.
The exhibition gathers generational differences—mature
and established artists along with those emerging—along with differing
practices and mediums. Within this manifold of differences there are
repetitions of concerns, with works that consider the act of transportation in
its materiality, scale or concept through specific relations to place and
context. The exhibition features a number of compacted works from London,
Vienna and Sydney that will be transported and expanded, developed or realised
onsite at ALASKA Projects.
It could be said: When we are 'dream'n wild' we
transport ourselves out of our material bodies. We extend beyond physical and
practical restraints that seem to limit our capacities in order to imagine we are
making something no longer finite: Something impossibly huge, or impossibly
bright or deep, in spite of our reason or a given logic.
Dream’n Wild recalls two unrealized concepts from the late Austrian artist, Franz
West: He dreamt of making a series of impossible projects. One of these was the
constructing of a room whose artificial incandescence was so infinitely bright
that on entry one would be blinded. Light, illumination, here becomes
infinitely dangerous. There was another project, also impossibly spatial,
though in this case volumetrically so: West wanted to fit the water from an
entire swimming pool into a teacup.
Building on West’s wild dreams as a project-premise,
the exhibition challenges its viewers to piece together seemingly dissociated objects,
removed from their locales, contexts or places of origin and now embedded into
a new environment. And given this peculiar title “ALASKA Projects,” whose
locale is a concrete underground car park in central Sydney, and whose name
dreams an impossibly huge place on the other side of our globe, our desires to
realise Dream’n Wild are only further incited.
The exhibition with be accompanied with a text from
Agnieszka Roguski (DE) Contemporaneity, Homemade written in Vienna as
critic in residence in Autumn 2017 at studio das weisse haus, published as a
text collage within the jubilee publication of das weisse haus | Don’t call
it Offspace, Verlag für moderne Kunst Wien.
Alexander Jackson Wyatt would like to thank all the
artists, Alaska Projects, David Pestorius, A.D.S. Donaldson, Sophie Tappeiner,
Lucas Davidson and the Franz West Privatstiftung for their support.
Jonny Niesche appears courtesy of Sarah Cottier
Gallery, Sydney.
Consuelo Cavaniglia appears courtesy of Kronenberg
Wright Artists Projects, Sydney.
Bonita Bub appears courtesy of The Commerical, Sydney.
This exhibition has been realised with the support of
the Austrian Embassy, Canberra
The exhibition acknowledges Aboriginal and Torres
Strait Islander peoples as the traditional custodians of our land – Australia.
The City acknowledges the Gadigal of the Eora Nation as the traditional
custodians of this place we now call Sydney.