Racks 2: A Solid Workout

Ben Leslie

Opening 11.01.17 6-8pm
Artist Talks 27.01.17 6-7pm

Racks 2: a solid workout offers a playful counter to the modernist studio paradigm by framing various sculptures as body-racks or work-out devices that depict the studio as a site of gonzo-gymnastic physicality. This forms part of an ongoing meditation on the physical context of the modernist sculptors’ studio, featuring objects that might function as ‘non-functional’ gym equipment, a reference that subverts the clichéd, masculo-centric modernist model, but at the same time, animates the static nature of formal sculpture with the potential for physical engagement, non-seriousness and aesthetic hi-jinx. By approaching the tried, tested and failed romances of modernist sculpture’s historically recorded models, i.e. the stack, the column, the phallic, the yonic … with a sense of play, animation and compulsion, recent work has utilised these historical forms as mutable monuments that avail themselves to acts of re-purpose, re-animation, and perhaps even parody … but always with affection.