Species of Spaces

Species of Spaces, an exhibition project consisting of work by SCA lecturer Ryszard Dabek and PhD graduate Melissa Laing, will be on display at West Space from Friday 12 June to Saturday 4 July. The exhibition also features the work of Brett Jones and the WIRED Lab, an audio-based research group initiated by artist Sarah Last that is focused on the pioneering work of Australian sound artist Alan Lamb.

The title of the project is taken from the English translation of the French writer Georges Perec’s 1974 volume Espéces d’espaces. Like Perec’s book the exhibition is concerned with the possibilities inherent in the act of describing space. To this end a range of media and approaches are used that include photography, sound, video, animation and sculptural installation. For each of the artists included in this project, space is understood as a container and conduit of a multiplicity of relations, operations and forces. This is a model of spatial engagement that is underpinned to a certain degree by the architectural, either overtly as subject or as absent authority.

"The work I have made for this show consists of a series of small framed photographs and a sculptural work made of perspex that utilises a projected computer-based animation to reinterpret the photographic images. These works were developed from a visit to the Paris apartment of the architect Le Corbusier which I made whilst on research leave in 2007. In working with this space it was my intention to engage a type of architecture in reverse, using the photographs as source for a series of animations that reduced the implied certainties of the built space to the weightless domain of line and colour and the dynamics of movement. There is play of representational orders here that at once complicates and reanimates our perception of the space, that invites the viewer to step away from the hushed reverie for the passing of the Modern and into its psychic shadow zone", Ryszard Dabek, June 2009.

Image: Ryszard Dabek, still from you were there with me.