Melbourne artist Chris Bond is the winner of the inaugural BalletLab McMahon Contemporary Art Award (BMCAA).
His exhibition Congress will open Thursday 24 August at Temperance Hall.
Chris Bond’s practice involves the invention and embodiment of fictional artists, writers, organisations and scenarios that assist with the creative act. The process finds an end in the form of painted facsimiles of imagined books, magazines, exhibition catalogues and correspondence. Within institutional settings, his installations adopt the conventions of museum display to convey unlikely, often fantastic narratives. In each of these forms, Bond combines identity fabrication and closely-worked detail in order to play with knowledge and perception.
As an artist the invented characters take him down unlikely paths and it is these personas that allowed him to produce Congress.
‘After a meeting earlier this year at the State Library of Victoria with the historian Judith Weeks,’ Chris explains, ‘I came into possession of an old ledger book she claims was used as a sketchbook by the notorious social agitator Louise Bryce, who briefly hired the upstairs room at Temperance Hall as a studio space in 1975 to develop a private performance practice.
The book, titled Congress on the cover, contains pages of hand-drawn plans for timber and fabric sculptural forms that Bryce envisaged installing throughout the upstairs area at Temperance Hall, and included notations that described how each of the objects should be interacted with – none of which, according to Weeks’s research, ever materialised.
My aim in this exhibition is to give shape to Bryce’s ideas by physically constructing these designs in a manner as close as possible to her specified intentions, paying close attention to scale, material, and position in space, while attempting to recreate the relationship of the performer’s body to the object.
The Congress book is something of a curiosity. Weeks first heard of its existence from Bryce’s niece Jennifer Lesley, who kindly offered it to her after hearing of her interest in late twentieth century Australian performance art. Lesley believes it may have originated from the office of Bryce’s father, a lawyer, as its production dates from the 1940s. The title art on the front cover may have been stencilled by Bryce’s friend Len Gottlieb, who used this particular font in several designs for anarchist posters in the 1970s.
Over half of the pages of the book have been removed, and only eight drawings remain scattered throughout the remainder. After working with Judith Weeks to decode Bryce’s almost indecipherable text, I’ve tried to limit my interpretation of these eight drawings to the depicted performer’s relationship to object, material and space, looking beneath the menagerie of fantastic creatures, drips and cryptic scribbles that work their way across the surface, to the minimal, body-orientated visions below.’
The BMCAA was judged by Max Delany, Director of the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art (ACCA).
Bond studied Fine Art at RMIT in the mid-1990s and has exhibited since 2000. He undertook a studio residency at Gertrude Contemporary in 2001, and has since featured in numerous group and solo exhibitions at venues including the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, Gertrude Contemporary, Blindside, Centre for Contemporary Photography, Bus Projects, Heide Museum of Modern Art, National Gallery of Victoria, Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney and Samstag Museum, Adelaide. http://chrisbond.com.au/p/biography
‘’The BMCAA is the latest and most original contemporary art award honoring Victorian visual artists work at the cutting edge of practice. The BMCAA represents a shift away from traditional art awards by providing an opportunity for visual arts to engage with performative and interdisciplinary experimentation. BMCAA offers an alternative to institutional curated contemporary art awards by commissioning a new work that crosses art form and direction. We are setting a benchmark for visual arts curation at Temperance Hall.’ Temperance Hall and BalletLab Artistic Director, Phillip Adams.
The patron of the art award is Dr. Marcus McMahon one of Australia’s most sort after sleep specialist physicians. Marcus’ interest in contemporary art, painting, video, sculpture and photography is demonstrated in his impressive private collection featuring works from established Australian artists as well as the up and coming new breed. His collection is housed in his architectural designed Richmond residence. Marcus can be described as part of the next wave of Australian philanthropists pushing their love of contemporary art and culture to the forefront of the public domain.
Congress by Chris Bond, The BalletLab McMahon Contemporary Art Award exhibition will open at Temperance Hall, 199 Napier Street, South Melbourne, Thursday 24 August until 3 September 2017. Entry free. http://www.balletlab.com/
