Open 11am-5pm, Friday - Sunday, 29 June- 8 July
Opening event Saturday 30 June 3-5pm
Artist talk Saturday 7 July 3pm
No Trespassing begins a series of four exhibitions exploring the theme of navigation.
Navigation draws together artists and writers who explore the navigation of urban space. Approaches include the articulation of space with the body, walking and mapping projects, explorations of way-finding and navigational aids, and interrogation of the divide between public and private space. The series as a whole explores the way navigation and movement not only explores but also defines space, physical and metaphorical, personal and public. Molly Wagner's No Trespassing, with writer Sasanki Tenakoon, is the first in this series.
Nadia Odlum
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Molly Wagner No Trespassing 2018
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No Trespassing: the art and politics of walking in New South Wales is a process-based art project in which I walk the roads, highways and footpaths between Sydney and (eventually) Bathurst, New South Wales. The title highlights my sense of trespassing into lands and stories despite my practice of walking in public places and pedestrian zones, e.g. footpaths, the shoulder of the road, tracks and stories published for general access. I activate and share the historical and contemporary stories of these roads as a ‘Pedestrian Artist.’ My artworks are how I transform the roads into places rather than blurred images glimpsed through the windows of a speeding car. My walks are artistic and political acts that resist and confound contemporary habits of speed, spectacle, paranoia and consumption.
I want to acknowledge and pay my respects to the Traditional Owners and Custodians of the lands on which I walk, on which I trespass.
Molly Wagner
Molly Wagner No Trespassing
By Sasanki Tennakoon
“I only
went out for a walk and finally concluded to stay out till sundown, for going
out, I found, was really going in.” - John of the Mountains: The
Unpublished Journals of John Muir, conservationist.
Walking, for those of us privileged enough to
do so, is an innate movement that almost never warrants a thought. We merely
have to hint at the intent to walk, and in what direction, and our legs
dutifully shift into motion. The act of walking is one of our oldest modes of
transport and intrinsically linked to our wellbeing. Through walking in our
natural environments, we expose our bodies and immune systems to different,
seasonally accurate elements that help build our resilience and adaptability.
Sometimes our reality is ruled by convenience where we tend to shy away from
the discomfort of walking outdoors for longer periods of time and, in so doing,
shield ourselves from the elements. When our capacity to walk is taken away, by
illness, injury, age or environmental factors, only then might we come to
comprehend how profoundly powerful this movement is for our entire being.
Molly Wagner has cultivated a practice as a
Pedestrian Artist through a sustained and immersive investigation between the
body and the environment through the act of walking. While walking has always
formed some aspect of Molly’s practice, either as subject matter or a form of
thought, over recent years she has been documenting her experiences of walking
for cultural and artistic purposes.
In her body of work, No Trespassing, Molly responds to the story of the Wiradjuri
warrior Windradyne who walked from Bathurst to Parramatta in 1824. While the
historical narrative of Windradyne was her initial inspiration, Molly was
concerned about trespassing into a history that she did not feel she had the
right to share. She expanded her focus to encompass a variety of histories that
informed the routes that became the subject of her body of work. She walked
roads, highways and footpaths experiencing the increasingly challenging and
often invisible pedestrian walkways, highlighting the significantly different
experience of city walking to that of suburban and rural areas. Many of our
living environments reflect a favouring of motor vehicles, not pedestrian
traffic. Through walking, Molly also responds to the concept of slowing down,
seeing and looking to see instead of the autopilot of transit that hijacks our
peripheral vision and any meaningful engagement with our immediate surrounds.
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There is an artistic challenge in documenting
and creating a body of work from these ephemeral, lived experiences. As her
work is layered with context and meaning, ranging from social observations and
historical narratives to the politics of both physical and metaphorical acts of
trespassing, so too are the physical objects Molly creates in a process-based
actualisation of her time as a pedestrian. The works in the gallery that
accompany No Trespassing are
considered reflections on the scope of her journey on foot, a collection of
small monuments to memories attached to the small moments that make up of the
sum of her experiences.
Sasanki Tennakoon is an arts worker, emerging artist and writer based in the Blue Mountains. She has a Bachelor of Fine Arts from National Art School, Graduate Diploma in Information Management from University of Technology and works for Blacktown Arts and Sydney Story Factory. http://sasanki-tennakoon.com/
