A Leakage of Wholes (iterations)
Betty Russ
Gallery 4
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Popular culture uses speculative science fiction, fantasy and horror as a means to both ferment, and ignore, mounting eschatological terror. Within the context of imminent global catastrophe, speculation around plant consciousness and monstrous plants, as manifested in both philosophy and popular culture, is a site of productive tension concerning the vegetal, the more-than-human, and the future. Compelled by the unreal, unimaginable, the weird and eerie, queerness, and provocative ideas, experimental material investigations emerge of other possible worlds to describe these tensions.
While mining the polyvalent discourse of retro speculative science fiction as a site of research, the vegetal frequently emanates signs of what has been and what is to come. Weeds, or rather, plants supposedly out of place, have an immutable loquacity in the knowledge they hold of the capitalocene, and tell clairvoyant, veracious narratives of where we are headed.
Presented by Firstdraft in partnership with Metro Arts, Brisbane.
related exhibitions
We have partnered with WestWords to deliver our writers program this year.
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(maelstrom) presents new works by South Australian artists Nicholas Hanisch and Nicole Clift. The two bodies of work, oil paintings and hand-woven tapestries, are responses to tangible and intangible manifestations of density, respectively. Nicholas Hanisch’s small oil paintings on canvas and bronze present intense tonal studies of sudden force, such as volcanic eruptions, fireworks, black holes, meteor showers and billowing smoke clouds.
Some Sort of Notation takes its name from the journals of Alexander Marshack: an archaeologist who, in 1964, published a study on seemingly random, human-made notches on palaeolithic bones. Adamant that the markings were far from meaningless, he proposed they were complex lunar observations— a proto-writing system. “It is clearly neither art nor decoration,” he’d said, “but some sort of notation.”
At 2–4pm on Saturday 7 December, Firstdraft will be hosting Floor talks with our exhibiting artists
- Posted in exhibition, 2023 Program
- Tagged Betty Russ, February 2023, A Leakage of Wholes (iterations)