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Threads
MADA Gallery
Monash University, Faculty of Art Design and Architecture
21 July to 12 August, 2023



Exhibition Documentation: Andrew Curtis

Threads is the second exhibition in the MADA Gallery curated by Chantelle Mitchell and Jaxon Waterhouse as part of The line is life itself.  The exhibition features work by Chris Bond, Serena Bonson, Janet Burchill and Jennifer McCamley, Simon Denny, Diena Georgetti, IC-98, Regina de Miguel, John Nixon, Susan Norrie, Raquel Ormella, Patrick Pound, Koji Ryui, Warlimpirrnga Tjapaltjarri, Pam Virada.

As the second exhibition in the series The line is life itself , Threads considers the generative capacity of the line through the framework of the thread. Weaving into and across the Monash University Collection, Threads presents these holdings alongside commissioned and recent work from geographically and conceptually distant practitioners that illuminates the connectivity and entanglement of matter and materiality.

Like the web of a spider, a tangle in a child’s hair or a mycorrhizal network encircling the globe, threads materialise and give rise to relations, markers of contact and enmeshment. It is the filaments and fibres, alongside the act of their knotting and enmeshment that anthropologist and contemporary scholar Tim Ingold highlights as being central to the taxonomy of the line, and further, critical within the frame of life itself. Within this conceptual and material frame, the things and objects which make up the world are not rendered as “externally bounded entit[ies]” but rather as knots of constituent parts, knots whose trails entangle with the threads that comprise the knots of other forms.

Threads is concerned with connectivity, the diffuse and glaringly obvious ways in which things are tied together across time and space. Seemingly disparate, the works presented here are united by form, content, context or speculation and invite their conceptual and material underpinnings to be assembled and reassembled in endless formations. As Ingold states, the world is a “total movement of becoming which builds itself into the forms we see, and in which each form takes shape in continuous relation to those around it” - it is this which allows the distinction between animate and inanimate to dissolve, for the entirety of life to writhe and wriggle in unison or sympathy.

The exhibition includes a screening on the big screen at Caulfield campus of IC-98’s Theses on the Body Politic (Bind), 2020 on:
  • Thursday 20 July, 5–7pm
  • Saturday 22 July, 2–4pm
  • Wednesday 26 July, 2.30–3.00pm
  • Thursday 27 July, 2.30–3.00pm
  • Wednesday 2 August, 2.30–3.00pm
  • Thursday 3 August, 2.30–3.00pm

This large scale video work depicts a rope in a state of tension and transformation and is part of the Theses on the Body Politic series, which addresses the material conditions of the formation of society.


ROOM SHEET

CATALOGUE ESSAY