New Exhibitions: Rob Hood, Matthew Shannon

TWO NEW EXHIBITIONS AT THE PHYSICS ROOM

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Wrecked Pathological Stimulus Soap Rotational Vacuum Idle Earth Manifold Detergent Runtime Dada Glue
Rob Hood
8 July–2 August 2009

Opening preview: Tuesday 7 July 2009, 5.30pm

Tunnelling in amongst the received and symbolic order of things, Rob Hood’s exhibition for The Physics Room taps into and intuitively remixes elements of a range of his previous projects as well as interpolating newly salvaged materials.

With myriad associations intersecting within the space, Hood has assembled and amplified a mire of not-quite-everyday influences and experiences. As a result Wrecked Pathological Stimulus Soap Rotational Vacuum Idle Earth Manifold Detergent Runtime Dada Glue churns within the gallery, camping out for the duration within a chaotic but associatively fertile space.

Continuing to pursue a burlesque dialogue with the art of Walter de Maria, Yves Klein and elements of pulp fiction, Hood has turned to his own biographical roots for inspiration. Referencing and processing such disparate bodies of knowledge and agency as Fluxus, capitalism, constructivism, futurism, socialism, astrophysics, environmentalism, conceptualism and atheism…Hood collects and filters a variety of popular cultural tropes and manipulates the skins that cloak them within the mass media.

Collapsing the boundaries of various cultural terrains by channeling, layering and perforating their surfaces, broken windscreens, punctured posters and repetitively pierced billboard skins complicate and evaporate our experiences of acculturated space. Whether read as the outcome of unfettered formal impulses or as a porous and chaotic arrangement of the found objects that must be processed and sutured into contemporary subjectivity each day, Hood’s humorous delinquency is both wide-ranging and compelling.

Hood was born in 1974, Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. He has a BFA from the School of Fine Arts, University of Canterbury, and was the Olivia Spencer Bower Fellow in 2008. He is represented by Jonathan Smart Gallery, Christchurch, New Zealand.

The Physics Room receives major funding from Creative New Zealand/Toi Aotearoa.

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Infinity of wind muskets
Matthew Shannon
8 July–2 August 2009

Opening preview: Tuesday 7 July 2009, 5.30pm

Melbourne based artist Matthew Shannon is set to present his project Infinity of wind muskets at The Physics Room during July which will see him wire up a set of lights and an electric guitar via a sound to light amplifier.

Positioning an ambiguously abandoned and unamplified guitar within the gallery, Shannon invites his audience to interact with the silenced instrument. Potentially attuned to even the ambient vibration of the project’s audience simply moving within the space, the harder the strings vibrate the higher the voltage expelled by the light unit and the brighter the space becomes.

Picking up on the physical resonance of the space and whatever happens therein during the projects’ installation, Shannon’s guitar effectively functions as a vibration microphone with his lighting rig creating a sequence of fluctuations and shudders within the perceptual architecture of the gallery.

Materially connecting the space, the audience and the work in a time based play, Shannon’s title, Infinity of wind muskets, is taken from a letter the Baroque philosopher Gottfried Leibniz once wrote, in which he coined the term to describe through a type of oblique mystic poetry, the interconnected relationship between animate and inanimate matter.

Matthew Shannon graduated from the Victorian College of the Arts, Melbourne with a BFA in 2006. He lives and works in Melbourne and has been a resident in the studio artist programme at Gertrude St Contemporary Art Spaces since 2008. Recent solo exhibitions include: Infinity of Wind Muskets, Gertrude Contemporary Art Spaces, Melbourne (2008); Untitled, Seventh Gallery, Melbourne (2008) and pirtyaD, TCB Inc., Melbourne (2008). Group exhibitions include: Gertrude Studios 2008, Gertrude Contemporary Art Spaces, Melbourne (2008); Electro-magnetic Imaginary, Spectrum Gallery, Perth (2007) and Shine on you crazy diamond, Platform, Melbourne (2007).

ENDS

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