Artists: |
ADRIAN JONES | ||
Artist's StatementTo create an artwork which embodies the way difficult narratives trail off into unresolved territories. To persist in the idea that artmaking can do so in a way that strictly linear textual narrative cannot. To be more interested in things that trail off... It’s the parts that trail off that human lives consist of. Finding the name of an engineer in quotidian circulation (and usually they are not) 100 years after completing his work became the subject of Water Carrier. In Charles Yelverton O’Connor’s last project, water travels uphill 550 kilometres to Coolgardie from Perth. Water is drawn quietly, whispering from reservoir to reservoir. Whispers during his last days caused him to shoot himself. He wafted dead in waters off Robbs Jetty, south of Fremantle, the last smell in his nostrils from the slaughterhouse nearby. |
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CVExhibitions & Projects1999 Gargoyles, Joondalup Campus Sports Centre, Edith Cowan University, Western Australia. 1998 Window Text, State Library car park windows. 1997 Auto/Biography, Scapular Gallery Nomad. 1997 Cadaver, Festival of Perth Exhibition, Perth Institute of Contemporary Arts. 1996 Artworks for the Hay Street Mall, City of Perth commission. 1995 Acrobat, Mao Tse Tung Hour - a project by Hiram To, Ipswich Art Gallery, Queensland. 1995 Songs of the dearly departed, Lawrence Wilson Art Gallery, The University of Western Australia. 1993 The Nature of non-Material Evidence, Fifth Australian Sculpture Triennial, Grainger Museum, The University of Melbourne. 1992 Founder’s Café, Terracists - Temporal Public Art project curated by Urban Thresholds 1991 Project Text-Tiles, Perth Central Railway Station. 1987 Chronicles of a Golden Age, The Performance Space, Sydney. 1985 The Death of Four British Anthropologists, Praxis, Fremantle. |
Curator's StatementAdrian Jones 'homage' to CY O'Connor is a deeply ambivalent reflection on the place of water in the Australian psyche. On the one hand, there is the marvel of the pipeline that travels uphill to Kalgoorlie, reflected in the everyday wonders of osmosis and evaporation (both figuring prominently in the icon of the Coolgardie safe). And on the other hand, water is a threat to structures of containment that make a civilised society, both physical in dams and pipes, and psychological in control of emotions. The chaos of water in Jones' installation complements O'Connor's own stormy end. Mandaring Weir in overflow |
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