Push it, push it (real good)
Bruno Booth
Gallery 4
Opening 02.10.0.19 6-8pm
Artist Talks 24.10.19 6-7pm
Push it, push it (real good) explores the experience of navigating a wheelchair across difficult terrain. Utilising video, painting and installation, the project foregrounds the exaggerated physicality and repetition of movement required to master assistive equipment.
Using a wheelchair is an endurance sport. It can be painful, exhausting and strangely beautiful. Shopping trips are obstacle courses, crowded bars are an exercise in patience, kerbs are mountains and puddles inland seas. Rocky paths should be conquered, the alternative is a pedestrian life mediated by synthetic surfaces and sanitised experiences.
Repetition of motion (and its associated benefits and pitfalls) is something that wheelchair users know intimately. On opening night Bruno will invite visitors to help him laboriously move the ISA symbol across the floor with their hands. This performance/dialogue will serve as an entry point for the work and allow people to ask questions about the artist's practice and his experience of disability in an informal setting.
images
Bruno Booth, Pull cord for assistance, 2018, paper mâché, lights, speaker, rope, mdf, paint, found objects, variable
Bruno Booth, The elephant in the room, 2019, digital photograph, variable
Bruno Booth, Hostile Infrastructure, 2019, timber, paint, lights, micro-controller, wheelchair, participant, 20m x 3m x 3m Photo: Keelan O'Hehir.