Gorgeous shadow, bent dream
GORGEOUS SHADOW, BENT DREAM: TOM CAMPBELL, JOANNE LEONG, JACQUIE MENG AND GENIE STUART
Public program: Gossip ASMR:
6:00pm, Thursday 20 October, 2022. Gallery 2, Tuggeranong Arts Centre
Free.
Sonically beautiful, a gorgeous sound fills the air. Knuckling down in deep shadows, chiaroscuro against keen eyes. Something someone once told you in a whisper is pitched, amplified, distorted, or otherwise bent. Heads or tails as to whether or not you should reveal that you heard this secret in a dream. Gossip as warnings in the margins, a fungal network of care, a debugging interface.
For one night, Gossip ASMR returns. The hit performance series, now in its third iteration, will be staged at Tuggeranong Arts Centre as a public component by Tom Campbell, Joanne Leong, Jacquie Meng and Genie Stuart.
Exhibition continues until Saturday 29th October, 2022
Exhibition:
What happens in the millisecond between flicking the switch and the lighter igniting? There’s something beyond the apparent changes in temperature and light. A vocal distortion, sound stretching across and into the membrane between ear and comprehension. In the logic of a dream, a silk ribbon slips the surly bonds of earth and turns into a [lobster] or some other kind of digitally-realised costume. You might decide to whisper a secret to someone only to realise the music has stopped and you’re actually shouting. With one eye, the lights are on, and with the other, there’s some kind of dust on the lens, or gunk in the heart.
Gorgeous shadow, bent dream is a collaborative exhibition straddling performance, spectatorship, and the space generated in the exchange between performer, collaborator and audience. Emerging artists Tom Campbell, Joanne Leong, Jacquie Meng and Genie Stuart are interested in the ephemera of a performance – something which can imbue a stage, a projection, a poster, a painting, the sound itself with sheen, lustre, gloss and polish.
GSBD is an ASMR experience, a state of mind, a meet cute, and a love connection waiting to happen.
ABOUT THE ARTISTS
Tom Campbell is an artist and writer who works in fundraising on Ngunawal country. Tom considers a lineage stretching towards scotland and sabah borneo, where both sets of ancestors were involved in various forms of conflict and mediation. His work often attempts to articulate the gap between disclosure and resistance, muscles and memories through various forms of the spoken and written voice. In particular, he is invested in how the voice can be motivated as a technology towards persuasion, advocacy, humour, and gossip. Depending on which anecdote you choose to pursue, Tom has or hasn’t inherited the supernatural strength required to pull the palm tree up and out of the ground.
Joanne Leong is an Asian-Australian artist born in Hong Kong, based in Canberra. A recurring theme of her practice is translation and belonging between cultures and time. Leong’s works often explore how language and identity mediate relationships with family and community. She use video, sound, programming and installation as mediums to engage with the technological and cultural structures used to communicate with the people whom she loves.
Jacquie Meng works with painting, sound, and installation. Her work redefines diasporic cultural identity beyond national and geographical specificities, rather seeing it as unfixed. Through consideration of posthumanism, performativity, and the migration of objects and imagery between cultures, Meng breaks down binaries of “East”/”West”, real/imagined, and human/non-human. This often involves a fusing of mythology and folklore with memories, fictions, and contemporary aesthetics.
Genie Stuart is a sound artist. She is a woman of few words but many sounds.