Nyx Mathews, Nyx Mathews x KÜNST Consortium Untitled no.22 (gallery still), 2021. Image courtesy the artist.
OPENING EVENT: Wednesday 2 February from 6:00pm at ANCA Gallery. Free to attend, no bookings required.
The inevitability of growth is a garden within the gallery. The garden is a contained and constructed site for the practice of gardening - an ongoing doing which never gets done - the garden is in a perpetual state of becoming. It is a field of noticing, shaped by attention. It is mundane and sublime. It is an inherited lawn, a sanctioned moat around your house, a place to eat breakfast, to read and grow food, a luxury during lock-down, a hassle after heavy rains.
If ‘garden’ (the verb) can be a metaphor - an apparatus for a way of doing something - what happens when it is applied to other contexts? What is it to garden a text?...a gallery?...the dinner table?...an archive?...or whatever is on your mind? The inevitability of growth tests ways of tending, being attentive and being attuned to a variety of things, the way a gardener is to their garden.
The exhibition has been carefully planted, uprooted and transplanted in places, weeded, watered, pruned, mowed, and harvested by Rover Rinnie, Annie Parnell, Zev Aviv, Nyx Matthews, Othy Willis and Sophie Quinn. It may well sprout new growth over the course of the exhibition.
PUBLIC PROGRAM Saturday 19 February 1-2PM. Join the artists on a guided walking tour of the urban landscape surrounding ANCA Dickson, guiding practices of noticing unplanned plants and overlooked ecologies.
Rover Rinnie (R. R.) is an artist, writer and curator who works collaboratively to create exhibitions, publications and creative research projects which meld the mundane, sublime and personal facets of life.
Annie Parnell works with people, introduced plant species, text and sculpture to excavate obscured and emergent narratives and ecologies on unceded Ngunnawal/Ngunawal/Ngambri Country.
Zev Aviv is a queer multi-disciplinary artist raised with privilege on unceded Ngunnawal/Ngunnawal/Ngambri land. They enjoy making people uncomfortable and working with their hands, though not at the same time.
Nyx Mathews’ multi-disciplinary practice utilises sculpture, fiction and digital media to critique 21st century institutions and built environments, and propose speculative alternatives.
Othy Willis’ work is an appendage to infrastructural and ecological dynamic systems; the aesthetics and invisible connections they embody, how we value the trash we discard. Othy incorporates these into a liberatory processes of community sovereignty; hacking old fans into wind turbines, or composting the waste we excrete.
Sophie Quinn works in two and three dimensions, often exploring tensions between traditional and non-traditional materials. By interrogating certain concepts – such as masking and protecting – her aim is to explore the challenges of connection and concealment.