Pillar to Post
A-head
Alex Gawronski: A-head, 2019
(Aluminium air-conditioning duct, monitor, digital video loop)
‘Pillar to Post’ (Hany Armanious, Margaret Brink, Mitchel Cumming, Scott Donovan, Alex Gawronski, Elise Harmsen, Shane Haseman, Biljana Jančić, Sean Kerr, Rose Nolan, Ronnie van Hout, Jelena Telecki, Justene Williams)
Sydney College of the Arts (SCA) galleries, curated by Alex Gawronski
‘Pillar to Post’ considered the spaces of Sydney College of the Arts galleries from a variety of physical, material and conceptual perspectives. In particular, the exhibition addressed the unique physical peculiarities of SCA’s ageing colonial-era architecture. It also alluded literally to those base architectural elements that support the exhibition spaces themselves. A-Head, depicted at the end of a nine-metre length of industrial air conditioning duct, an anonymous head alternatingly facing on-coming and passing city traffic. The title obviously played on the subject of the video, a head simply watching. Of course ‘the head’ is a traditional object of sculpture. At the same time the title suggested the notion of art as a privileged means of penetrating to the future, to another, better, time. Here though the future was as noisy and banally repetitious as daily life can be. It is typical for art to seek representations of the fantastic and formally ‘exceptional’. Often however such focus diverts attention from the typical material and routine aspects of everyday existence: presenting the ‘amazing’ does not make life amazing, especially if primary access to it is determined by capitalist exchange. To possess a contemporary image of utopic freedom is to render its emergence in real-life merely symbolic, an object of possession.
A L E X G A W R O N S K I 