Currently showing at the University of Tasmania’s Inveresk Library (level three) are a series of vitrines that are curated by Sawtooth ARI director, Zara Sully. Every two months different artists are invited to reflect upon their practice and how it relates to the library’s theme of ‘Ways of Knowing.’

currently exhibiting

Ways of Knowing- Textiles

Mae Finlayson & Nicole O'Loughlin.

PREVIOUS VITRINES

Ways of Knowing- Humour

Robert O'Connor & Penny Walker-Keefe

Robert O’Connor

Sister Wendy has a posse (left image)

Sister Wendy Beckett was hilarious insofar as a buck-toothed nun who got visibly horny over artworks and hosted her own television series can be.

Sister Wendy didn’t think much of Renoir. Nor Dali. Neither do I and that’s why I love her. She had no sex ever, just looked at art and prayed. She really was just like us. She had no social life and she was once heard on Desert Island Discs saying that she takes a “spectator's delight” in other people but doesn’t really hang out with them.

In 2018 after years of looking at art, praying three times a day, having exactly zero friends, and no sex at all, all for some unseen higher power, Sister Wendy died.

And that’s it – that’s the joke. The laughs on us.

Penny Walker-Keefe

Arabella and Anita Fight for the Title (right image)

In 1973 NASA launched the world’s first space station, Skylab. Two spiders named Arabella and Anita were taken aboard the space station as a science experiment to test their web-spinning abilities in space.

The spiders spent two months living in space. At first, they were disoriented, but in just two days they adjusted to low-gravity and began to spin webs. They died onboard Skylab, but their bodies were brought back to earth for study, and now reside in American museums.

After only two missions, the space station was left to gradually decay and in 1979 it entered the Earth’s atmosphere, breaking up and crashing over southern Western Australia. In an absurd union of events, a piece of the Skylab wreckage was driven from Esperance and presented on stage at the Miss Universe beauty contest, taking place in Perth that same week.

This artwork presents an alternative ending to the lives of these two spider astronauts; tired from years of hard work maintaining a space station, they coordinated a controlled crash, hitched a ride to Perth as stowaways in space debris, and entered a beauty pageant.

Ways of Knowing- Process

Kiah Pullens & Helene Boyer

Kiah Pullens

Flir3428_the making of the pleasure was all mine (left image)

Flir3428_the making of the pleasure was all mine is a new work developed for the collaboration between Sawtooth Gallery and Utas by Kiah Pullens.

Pullens’ residency at a photographic lab in Berlin 2022, exposed the often intimate workings of inside the darkroom, using a heat sensitive camera to capture the body as it emanates heat while focused and sometimes stressed.

From video recording to digital negative to hand printed analogue photograph, the work Flir3428_the making of the pleasure was all mine has been treated through a series of repetitive studio processes. The audience is provided intimate access to an unknown space, to a curated performance of dance in the dark, to a collaboration between artist and machine. This collaboration no longer just exists in the dark, and now contributes to the archive.

Helene Boyer

A Matter of Degree / Now you see it, now you don’t (right image)

A Matter of Degree (front sculpture) asks us to consider the degree of future environmental loss from increased sea surface warming. Tasmania’s marine habitats, some of the most biologically diverse in the world, are especially impacted; cold water loving Giant Kelp Forests have disappeared (they are the transparent ‘ghosts’ in this work). Unique kelp-covered reefs, colourful sponge gardens, soft corals, anemone and algae varieties are at risk. Similar past lost botanical bounty is now seen only ‘under glass’ in academic collections.

Now you see it, now you don’t (suspended sculpture). Created for this installation, I wanted to enable you to see the different ways that glass can transmit light and capture colour, depending on how it is treated after flamework. I also wished to exploit the emotional potential of the material by encapsulating a number of different surface finishes in a ‘nature story’ that suggests more than a seasonal lessening.

Ways of Knowing - Reflecting the Institution

Damien Melchiori & Marguerite Carson

Damien Melchiori

SYMBOLIC<>RUPTURE [SARCOPHAGIC DISPLAY]

Consider the exchanges and flows of power operating behind the scenes in the structuring of what we define as Knowledge; violent structures, theatres of the language-based symbolic order that historical narratives of progress attempt to maintain dominance within. In our present time, the popular concept of Knowledge appears to be inextricably tethered to the lingering traces of a project from the past, a project that attempted absolute taxonomical categorisation and evaluation of nature, regardless of the cost. Perhaps the proposed achievements of the Enlightenment project could be reconsidered in the presence of our contemporary geopolitical disparities and looming ecological disasters.

Could we experience positive, productive potentials by reframing familiar considerations of binary oppositions such as: Knowledge/Non-knowledge? And could we therefore locate other ways of knowing – after all, knowledge does not necessarily illuminate the shadows of superstition; rather the light of knowledge might result in the casting of new shadows, and by extension, new knowledge. In a polemic turn from traditional western techno-scientific ways of knowing, contemporary art could embrace unorthodox strategies for approaching new communicative forms, and transmit new intuitive and embodied knowledges for the present and beyond.

My practice explores mutually informing relationships between processes of creation and destruction in artistic production. Drawing upon a range of historical understandings of cultural-material production, it explores how complex socially constructed systems of influence and contestation productively interact in works of art. Of particular interest are works of art created through methods of radical material or contextual alteration, mutation, erasure, or destruction.

To qualify an action as creative or destructive is ultimately tenuous and culturally relative, for one person’s iconophilia might be another’s iconoclasm. My practice harnesses potentials for new communication through contradiction with a view to better understanding ways to creatively utilise the tensions and frictions found in contradiction. Ambiguity is central to my practice and as such, interpretation is multiple, narratives are able to be mixed and remixed, and the location of the art object is in a constant state of flux.

Speculating and generalising upon the history and identity of any given artwork can assume many forms and can lead to strange “eureka” moments. I refer to this speculation as “epistemic apophenia”—a neologism suggesting that new knowledge could be revealed through misinterpretations or cavalier syntheses of existing knowledges. It implies an uncertain relationship between knowing and not knowing. A suggestion is that proceeding with limited or incorrect knowledge, synthesising supposedly incompatible knowledges, and forming patterns at random could result in positive and productive potentials.

Informed by a longstanding interest in productive tensions produced through opposing forces—such as noise and silence, order and disorder, or the institution and the “underground”—my practice seeks a conceptual framework for better understanding the ways in which opposing forces are necessary parts of the same cycles of constant change. I do not as consider these oppositionalities as simple binaries or dichotomies but rather as dynamic relationships which are complex, multifaceted, and multidirectional, and seeks to identify moments of rupture caused by tensions and conflicts in the overlays of opposites.

Marguerite Carson

Mothlight (right image)

The history of the vitrine is a charged one; rooted in Victorian obsession with collecting, display and preservation. Tied inextricably to the extractive nature of knowledge, its classification, and the church’s elevation of relic-objects from the un-remarkable to the realms of the precious and powerful.mIn art the vitrine is an uncomfortable space, a barrier or isolation chamber for sculpture, a separation from the embodied and visceral nature of the object.

Existing in this discomfort Mothlight explores the vitrine as site, a place where time stops, doesn’t move, air flow ceases, circulation slows, nothing is breathing. Sealed behind glass there is an interiority, filled with a muffled and inflexible temporality. Vitrines flatten time or remove it, disallowing it to take its course, actively battling decay. This is a work that is about looking, about the gaze, about the power of the institution to freeze something and to display it, mute. To display, as if to splay, as if to pin open and vulnerable permanently. To render without air and therefore without life. The vitrine is a killing.

A projection is a transmutation [of form to image] thrown to wherever it lands. The work enacts a double looking, through the glass pane of the vitrine and the glass lens of the projector, creating an image which is ripped from the (di)splayed moth lying amid its dust. Dust - the ghost of industry, sourced from Triabunna and the now renovated wood chip mill which at its peak was the largest in the world. In its removal from form the image becomes surface-less, liquid and etherial. Cast in the light from beneath, focussed by the Fresnel lens on which it lies the moth finds new life in its familiar, a mirroring takes place as the image flips not once [through the lens] but twice as the mirror in the projector which would usually allow script to be read right-way-round on such a projection, has been removed.

A projection is an extension, a protrusion into space, seeking escape. The moth lives again as the most simple of indexical marks, an inscription or figure that forms the building blocks of writing and the smallest constituent part of a typeface; a glyph. The image enacts its escape not in the throw of the projected but in another transmutation, into writing and out of the realm of the visual - into the spoken. Only in the voice can the moth and its image, its familiars, escape the trapping glass and the pinning gaze. Freed from the scene.

Ways of Knowing- Queer

Emma Berry + Liv Moriarty & Olly Read

Emma Berry + Liv Moriarty

driving backwards on a one way street (left image)

We learn the world through mistakes, we backtrack, apologise, we stutter. We convene in the middle to retrace our steps. We miss a turn and veer off the path. driving backwards on a one way street, is self referential to the way in which we operate and move through the world. We amalgamate experiences, conversation, trains-of-thought and interpretation to see where we land. We lean into our clumsiness and allow ourselves to blunder.

Olly Read

The Exquisite Corpse of a Self-made Man (right image)

Olly Read (Impious Monk) is an emerging artist from north-west lutruwita (Tasmania). Their creative output derives from an obsession and preoccupation with the body stemming from their experiences being transgender. They are particularly interested in the manipulation of mundane materials to highlight the alien nature of the seemingly familiar. Olly’s work is multi-media in nature; incorporating textiles, stop-motion animation, video projection, sound design, photography, collage, and more. After 6 years of study, Olly has emerged from the studios of the University of Tasmania’s Inveresk campus with a distinct and clear artistic voice, as well as a Master of Fine Arts in 2022 and a Bachelor of Contemporary Art with First-Class Honours in 2019.

Ways of Knowing - Cultural

Lara Chamas & Bianca Templar

Lara Chamas

Mortars and Pestles (left image)

Lara Chamas is a Lebanese, Australian artist, based in Naarm (Melbourne), fleeing from civil war, her parents migrated to Australia, where she was born. Her practice investigates topics of postcolonial and migrant narratives within the context of her cultural identity. Using narrative and experience documentation, storytelling, transgenerational trauma and memory and tacit knowledge; her research intends to explore links and meeting points between narrative theory, cultural practice, current political and societal tensions, and the body as a political vessel. Central to her practice is the expansion of these notions in a more historical and anthropological sense. With discussing geopolitical issues, research and first-hand experience is important to the authenticity of her work.

Bianca Templar

Takamuna rrala (stand strong) (right image)

Takamuna rrala (stand strong) is a showcase of Palawa culture through the eyes of one of its community members, Bianca Templar. Takamuna rrala showcases a variety of different aspects of palawa/pakana culture, from the more traditional practices of shell stringing and basket making, to the contemporary aspects of painting (utilising the Tasmanian Aboriginal Petroglphs) and resin art. Takamuna rrala is not only showcases the passing of cultural knowledge through generations, but to show the ongoing strength of the palawa/pakana people who have continued to strive despite the ongoing effects colonisation has had.

The University of Tasmania x Sawtooth ARI