Masks for Magicians
CAVES, Melbourne
25.05.2018 – 16.06.2018
Several years ago, I inherited a number of art history textbooks from my mother, a high school art and ceramics teacher who began teaching in the early 1970s. Masks for Magicians is an ode to an educational handbook titled The Story of Sculpture (1969). In technical and aesthetic terms, the publication’s photographic reproductions of ancient, ‘primitive’ and modernist sculptures vary considerably. Some are bland, awkwardly cropped, and captured with harsh strobe lighting. Others emanate a strange nostalgic resonance that transcends their instructional purpose. The objects in my works are sourced from the storerooms, cupboards and waste bins of educational institutions where I have taught photography. These abstract forms, teaching aids and detritus are treated with a sort of reverence; as miniature ‘monuments’ to the recurring forms, motifs and imagery of pedagogy. Masks for Magicians seeks to reactivate these disused and abandoned objects, and to re-contextualise the psychological space once occupied by such artefacts and their inherent aesthetics, which have long been relegated to the archives, laying dormant in the interiors of educational institutions.
Phase, 2018
Gelatin Silver print (Agfa-Geveart Brovira fibre paper, c. 1975), 10 x 8 inches when framed.
The Importance of Nature, 2018
Digital type C print, 19 x 16 inches
Continuous Relief, 2018
Digital type C print, 15 x 12 inches
Peasant’s Straw and Feathers, 2018
Digital type C print 15 x 12 inches
Diminished Knowledge, 2018
Patinated bronze, 18.5 x 9.5 x 4.5 cm
Sex Acts and Warfare, 2018.
Gelatin Silver print, 10 x 8 in
Contained Without Enclosing, 2018
Digital type C print, 15 x 12 inches
Pointing at Machines, 2018
Gelatin Silver print (Agfa-Geveart Brovira fibre paper, c.1975), 10 x 8 inches when framed.
Masks for Magicians, CAVES, Melbourne
Exhibition text by August Bassae