15 July 2019

Archeological Survey: Inner West Sydney Sector to Outback Beyond - opening 6-8pm Friday 26 July

Luke Power

Open 11am - 5pm Sat 27-Sun 28 July

project space project #18


Luke Power Texting Home (2019). Paper collage, street posters.
Sliced, diced, ripped and torn: layer upon layer of paper exposed 
and transformed as discarded street posters become works of art. 

Graphic art, the language of advertising, concepts around cultural events, memory, place, home, and belonging are fragmented and arranged in collaged assemblages. 

Thick layers of large posters ripped off walls – popular, political and cultural messages for the masses, are dissected into circular samples and integrated with other artefacts [rusty car parts, video imagery, plant and soil matter from Central Australia]. The pop posters are a peephole, a liminal zone, disrupting the misnomer ‘wilderness’ which harks back to the Terra Nullius declaration by colonial populations. 

Raymond Haines, the French conceptual assemblage artist (1926-2005), collected Venice Biennale street posters in the 60s and 70s,  showing the beauty of decayed surfaces and the history of layered paper 'collated over time' by random event organisers. His retrospective exhibition of these collages in the 2017 Venice Biennale was mesmerising. Fast forward to the 90s, and New Zealand-born Australian artist, Rosalie Gascoigne, playfully cuts up black and yellow road work signs, shuffles them into a two tone, joyful jumble of text and line through sculptural imagery.

Artworks developed for Archeological Survey: Inner West Sydney Sector extends these processes to expose our memories, connecting country to city - morés, materiality, languages - our ephemeral ‘footprints’.