Power Objects
curated by Lauren Burrow
Swarf
exhibition text
17 August – 21 September, 2024
Opening: Saturday, 17 August, 4-6pm
151 Melville Rd, Brunswick West, Wurundjeri Country
Burchill McCamley (Vic)
CAConrad (USA)
Gloreen Campion (Maningrida, NT)
Taylor Davis (USA)
Olivia Koh (Vic)
Aodhan Madden (France)
Swarf is a new gallery opening in a former factory that manufactured kerosene lanterns for eighty years in Brunswick West, Narrm. The gallery is initiated by artist and educator Lauren Burrow, with intermittent organisational and curatorial collaborations with others. Swarf is the name of the metal dust and other waste material produced by machining.
Power Objects brings together the works of seven artists connected by their deep attention to form and material, and the urgency of this attention as a mode of being ecologically, cosmologically, and politically situated. What is the value in paying attention? Blink and you’ll miss it, unless that blink is paused and extended into a perpetual moment of inward reflection. Going inward is always a form of going outward anyway, with a different spatial sensibility. The exhibition is celebratory, transformative way of holding onto things that already over: species extinction, the death of parents, industry closure. As poet CAConrad writes, “To / desire / the world as it is / not as / it was.”
The exhibition’s title refers to a text by art historian and critic, Michael Brenson, about the work of Taylor Davis: “It seems permanently, ontologically askew. And what is its logic anyway? Maybe this meticulously sawed and milled black walnut construction is not about rationality but about fantasy, or in equal parts availability and alarm." Power Objects are obstacles commanding influence, if only momentarily, but undeniably.
- Lauren Burrow 2024
Installation view (pictured L to R): Taylor Davis, Duck Goes Out. Janet Burchill & Jennifer McCamley, Force (Simone Weil Project). Gloreen Campion Tasmanian tiger. Olivia Koh Offerings (altar/table). Photo: Christian Capurro
Installation view (pictured L to R): Janet Burchill & Jennifer McCamley, Force (Simone Weil Project). Taylor Davis, Duck Goes Out. Gloreen Campion Tasmanian tiger. Olivia Koh Offerings (altar/table). Janet Burchill & Jennifer McCamley, Force (Simone Weil Project). Photo: Christian Capurro
Installation view: Olivia Koh Offerings (altar/table), 2024. Earthenware, aluminium, steel, plastic. Naarm, Vic
