Shannon Toth, Compression Repression, 2024. Courtesy the artist.

Soft Cell

Melbourne Art Fair

Shannon Toth, Amy Prcevich, Easton Dunne, Danica I. J. Knežević, Dustin Voggenreiter,

Roomsheet

Artist Talks

11 am Saturday, February 24th

Dustin Voggenreiter and Danica I. J. Knežević

2 pm Saturday, February 24th

Easton Dunne and Shannon Toth

Within the shared realms that we move through lies a concealed network of invisible architecture that charts separate paths and boundaries. These paths, defined by vague conventions, act as both guide and limit, directing the transit of bodies as they traverse a landscape fraught with uncertainty, systemic barriers and structural inequalities. Soft Cell brings together work by five artists from the 2023 Firstdraft program to navigate these nebulous and unclear borders and ambiguous social constructs. 

At the edge of maps in open-world video games players encounter a virtual boundary, imperceptible yet impenetrable.  A collision occurs, progress is abruptly halted. When meeting these invisible walls the character model stutters and jives against them as the player attempts to push beyond the horizon. Occasionally game designers will create a canonical explanation for this interruption; you’re marooned, isolated in a locked room, or not permitted to pass the city limits. Rarely, the explanations for the barriers in our own lives are so simple. Built on histories of exclusion, the walls of soft cells pitch and yaw in line with shifting values and changing hierarchies.  

In line with this, the veil of "tradition" is thin and malleable and is often co-opted and weaponised to maintain systems of privilege and altered to suit the purposes of exclusion. Is it cultural preservation or stagnation to maintain these unspoken rules, once built on precedent and now held together unconvincingly by a fetishisation of tradition? “We have always done it this way” seems a hollow mantra clinging desperately to the past. This feeble war cry declares disdain, a fear of the other, the new, and the different from myself, in rigid assuredness.

The safeguarding of traditions becomes a discernible marker of privilege while occupying soft cells reminds us that barriers to access extend beyond the physical. Some of us have no gatekeeper to challenge our passage through these concealed walls. Pathways of opportunity stretch out before them, unobstructed and unimpeded, while others navigate a maze of restrictions and obstacles. Spectral, unseen sentries maintain our so-called, social order - comfortable, institutional, ignorant.