Improper Fractions

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14 June – 6 July 2013

Main space: Madison Bycroft & Anna Horne – Improper Fractions 

 

Image: Madison Bycroft, Stoop (video still), 2012.

 

 

Image: Anna Horne, Untitled, 2013, PVC clothesline, plaster, paint, 180 x 18 x 17cm.

 

Improper Fractions is a collaboration between emerging Adelaide-based sculpture and installation artists’ Madison Bycroft and Anna Horne. This exhibition features new works that ‘play off’ each other in the Main space of Constance.

In Improper Fractions, Bycroft explores an animist way of being in the world, rethinking what it means to be a ‘person’, while relating to others. Bycroft’s video and performance works are presented as short experiments in unlearning the self, undoing normalised modes of being, the practice of empathy and processes of becoming other. In lieu of categorical and colonising thought, Bycroft is interested in relational understanding, something which requires compassion: in Latin, a feeling that extends to difference—to the animal and other people—creating a sense of communion with the world.

At Constance, Bycroft continues her exploration of animal and becoming other, extending an invitation to the audience to be and behave in non-traditional ways within the gallery space. She takes the notion of an improper fraction, making use of, and perhaps poking-fun-at, value systems and classification hierarchies.

For Horne, Improper Fractions is an installation of objects reminiscent of ornaments from a domestic space and naturally occurring forms. Horne’s collection of objects is a testament to decorative household items, collectables and materials remembered from the artists own past domestic experiences.

Anna Horne uses new manufactured materials and puts them through a methodical making process influenced and contradicted by naturally forming organic shapes, such as rocks and crystals. She has previously used materials that resemble ‘real’ products such as faux wood, fake grass and plastic carpet. Horne uses the contradiction of naturally formed versus artificial objects to draw attention to the ambiguity caused from a collision of old and new, faux and real. The striking disparity between the familiarity of her materials and the strangeness of the works themselves is at the crux of her practice.