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Alex Gawronski
Harbinger | 2017
Harbinger. @
Weather is everywhere at all times. It is pre-human and will persist long after humans have perished. The terrible obviousness of these sentiments nonetheless provokes other considerations. We think of weather like we think of maps. When we look at a map we apprehend it as a manifestation of an objective ‘thing’ called geography. We never think ‘right here where these lines intersect, people are dying’. Or being displaced. We consider a map for its perfect graphic legibility. We have no means of seriously shaping geography just as we have no immediate means of controlling weather. Still weather carries warnings. These are subjective and emotional as well as concretely observable. No matter where we are, whatever the weather is or becomes, it will get to us.
bio:
Alex Gawronski is a Sydney-based artist and writer. Recent projects include The National, three large-scale installations across the AGNSW, MCA and Carriage Works, Sydney (2017); Big Cheese, Dark MOFO, Contemporary Art Tasmania (CAT), Hobart (2016); Black Square 100 Years (1913/1915), Tcb inc. Melbourne, (2015); Logical Volume Identifier, Plimsoll Gallery, the University of Tasmania, Hobart; the Deconsumptionists, Art as Archive in Situ, Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit (MOCAD), Detroit, USA (2014); Easy Listening, West Space, Melbourne; Black Square – 100 Years (1913/1915), AEAF, Adelaide (2013). Gawronski has also been a co-founding director of a number of independent artist spaces, most recently KNULP, Sydney (2015– ) and the Institute of Contemporary Art Newtown (ICAN) (2007–15).
statement:
Much of my art assumes the guise of architectural installations. These installations – potentially incorporating at any one time construction, photography, painting, video and sound – focus on the institutional dynamics that underwrite and determine how we see and consume art. In my practice I frequently use gallery and museum spaces to construct narratives that fictionalise and question the assumptions of these spaces. This is especially the case insofar as such spaces seek to present a veneer of neutrality that aims to separate them from the socio-political contexts that, in reality, define them. Of course, such an approach may be brought to bear on any site, whether interior or exterior, private or public, urban or remote.
