One of Australia's most respected contemporary artist duos Claire Healy and Sean Cordeiro will present new work in a free public exhibition at Art Space on The Concourse in Chatswood from 9 August until 3 September 2023.
The artists, who represented Australia at the Venice Biennale in 2009, present Persistence of Vision; The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters, an exhibition comprising mosaic renderings of the paranormal created out of well worn, second-hand pieces of Lego - chosen for its nostalgic and playful overtones.
With this new body of work Claire Healy and Sean Cordeiro explore spectres of the past and the delusions of the near-present in an exhibition that questions our fascination with fear and the phantastic.
The artists take as a starting point traditional concepts of monsters such as the Loch-ness Monster, ghostly spectres, little green men and Bigfoot, whilst questioning what has replaced these in the current day.
The exhibition includes small sculptures of improvised weapons collected in the aftermath of the January 6th insurrection of the Capitol in Washington DC, USA.
"Just as Lego is well known by all, so too are the phantastic creatures that inhabited movies, TV and pulp books. The pixilated nature of Lego lends itself well to describe the photographic, televisual or digital nature of this neo-folklore," say Healy and Cordeiro.
The combination of the themes explored and the materials used to create the work seems innocuous but both subjects suggest a desire to transpose the make-believe into the real. The works ask: do we have so much mental energy that we just can't resist conjuring up paranormal stories to titillate us?
"Bigfoot, Nessie, Mani-pogo, Bukit Timah Monkey Man, come back, we need you. If humans must believe in the phantastic, can we at least keep our monsters endearing?" adds Healy and Cordeiro.
Persistence of Vision; The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters is part of Chatswood Culture Bites 2023 - Willoughby City Council's innovative program of music, theatre, comedy and more.
Art Space on The Concourse will also invite local High Schools to engage with the artwork of the internationally renowned artists, who may be studied as examples for the Visual Arts curriculum.
ABOUT THE ARTISTS Claire Healy and Sean Cordeiro
Claire Healy and Sean Cordeiro use their artistic practice as a tool to locate themselves within the cultural systems of contemporary society. The pair believe that the central motif of our age is the tension created between the Primacy of the Individual and the Social Contract that is subscribed to through a complex, global inter-dependancy. The formal and informal systems of our collective society both supports and constricts the individual.
The artistic collaboration reconfigures and juxtaposes elements of the biological, the historic, the cultural and the astronomical to create artworks that help decipher who we are and what we have gained and forfeited in order to realise our present existence.
Their work has been included in numerous exhibitions in Belgium, China, the Czech Republic, France, Germany, Hong Kong, Italy, Japan, New Zealand, Singapore, Switzerland, Turkey, Taiwan, the UK and the USA.
Career highlights include solo exhibitions at the Künstlerhaus Bethanien, Berlin; The Art Gallery of New South Wales; La bf15, Lyon; The Corcoran Gallery, Washington DC and a survey exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney.
Healy and Cordeiro's installation Life Span was part of the Australian representation at the 53rd Venice Biennale. They have also participated in the Auckland Triennale, the Adelaide Biennial, Setouchi Triennale and the Oku-Noto Triennale, Japan. The City of Sydney commissioned their public work Cloud Nation which is located in the Green Square Library Tower.
They are based in the Blue Mountains, NSW.
Artists' website https://www.claireandsean.com
ARTIST TALK 11am – 12.30pm SATURDAY 19 AUGUST CHATSWOOD LIBRARY MEETING ROOM (Free)
Join Australian artist duo Claire Healy and Sean Cordeiro for a discussion on their work, artistic processes and creative influences. In conversation with Council's Curator Cassandra Hard Lawrie, these internationally renowned artists will explore their artistic collaboration and the ideas that sparked the creation of their body of work, Persistence of Vision; The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters.
Bookings here
ARTIST STATEMENT
Our body of work combines the diaphanous spectres of the past with the delusions of the near-present.
One of the Lego mosaics will be a rendering of frame 352 of the Patterson-Gimlin film; taken on October 20, 1967, claiming to document a Bigfoot aka The Sasquatch walking through a dry creek bed. The film was a staple of TV series and books such as Great Mysteries of the World and Usborne's The World of the Unknown. We have fond memories of perusing these kinds of creepy yet fascinating tales while playing with Lego in the lounge rooms of our youth.
We feel that rendering this famous and well known scene in pre-loved lego: faded and discoloured, utilitarian and loved by young and old; references the nostalgic period in which the Golden Age of Cryptozoology occurred. Just as Lego is well known by all, so too are the phantastic creatures that inhabited TV and pulp books. The pixilated nature of Lego lends itself well to describe the photographic, televisual or digital nature of our consumption of neo-folklore.
These days classic cryptids like Big Foot and the Loch Ness Monster are filed pretty close to the space on the shelf that Santa Claus or the tooth fairy reside. But it seems there was a gentler time when people could research these fantastic creatures within the Academy without being entirely jeered at. Our technological age has killed off these monsters but in doing so, have we given birth to newer, more virulent ones?
The internet seems to be the natural habitat where the new phantasms are born and thrive. Science's victory of the paranormal of old seems to have given birth to a whole new array of questionable chimeras: the Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters. As people find comfort in ideas such as Flat Earth Theory or Pizzagate theories, we may be pardoned for looking back to an age when Bigfoot's existence was still a possibility, with wistful fondness.
These mythic legends of yore have become part of our collective psyche. They were born during the age of oral folklore and thrived under the glow of the cathode ray tube. The steely gaze of the Scientific Method has all but banished these creatures from the realm of rational possibility. But in return we have been forced to live with the entirely irrational: freedumb fighters cooking up theories that make the Satanic Panic of the Eighties look moribund.
The January 6 riots are a macro effect of these flights of fancy. Unable to come to grips with the chasm between their imagined world and the harsh reality of public opinion, present day tin foil hat wearers endeavour to violently transpose the spectres in their minds into our reality. As a sauced up Rudolph said "We've got lots of theories, we just can't find the evidence."
