Optical Mix, and Christian Capurro: SLAVE

 

Christian Capurro: SLAVE and Optical Mix
16 August – 28 September 2014

SLAVE – Phone-videos capturing monumental works by American minimalist Dan Flavin, refashioned into large-scale filmic ‘captures’ by Australian artist Christian Capurro, feature in the upcoming exhibition SLAVE.
 
The exhibition, part of ACCA’s Influential Australian Artists program, opens at ACCA on 16 August alongside Optical Mix, a survey of works that use light, kinetics and visual oscillations.
 
Capurro’s phone-videos were made during a residency at the Sammlung Lenikus, Vienna.  An ongoing series, they are part homage, part theft, yet also compelling 'portraits' of Flavin’s iconic fluorescent monuments.  Capurro re-monumentalizes these works at an architectural scale in ACCA's own iconic architecture.
 
SLAVE represents a strain of the new film and image making that plays with some of the conventions that operate in the domains of reproduction, especially how they apply to, and are used in presenting the work of art.
 
Melbourne based, Capurro works across a range of media including drawing, photography, print, video and installation.  His work is process-based and conceptually oriented.  He is known for his  “erasure projects”, where the pages of glossy magazines were erased over a long periods of time using rubbers or correction-fluid.  In Another Misspent Portrait of Etienne de Silhouette (1999-2009), for example, a copy of Vogue Hommes (#92 September 1986) was systematically erased by over 250 people, each noting how long it took and what it that labour might have cost calculated on their usual hourly rate of pay.
 
SLAVE will be accompanied by the survey exhibition Optical Mix, which brings together a series of works that use light, kinetics and visual oscillations.
 
Works that play on perception and visuality are brought together in this international survey exhibition include, On Color/Multi#3 (1991) by Joseph Kosuth, Martin Creed’s Work No: 312, A lamp going on and off (2003), and Ugo Rondinone’s colour target painting No. 243 ZWEIUNDZWANZIGSTERMAERZZWEITAUSENDUNDEI, 2001.  
 
A new commission by Melbourne artists Cake Industries (Jesse Stevens & Dean Petersen) will be a central feature.  Two large-scale light pillars in ACCA’s Gallery 3, will expose the beauty and intricate nature of the individual ‘pixel’, drawing on our culture’s now co-dependent relationship with the screen.
 
Optical Mix also features works by Callum Morton, Daniel von Sturmer, Ken Jacobs, Stanislaus Ostoja-Kotowski, Nike Savvas, Bridget Riley, Ugo Rondinone and more.
 
Christian Capurro: SLAVE and Optical Mix
16th August – 28 September, 2014
 
Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, 111 Sturt St, Southbank.
10am – 5pm including weekends and public holidays
Wednesdays open late till 8pm, Monday by appointment .
Tel: 03 9697 9999.  Admission: Free.  www.accaonline.org.au
 
ACCA is supported by the Visual Arts and Craft Strategy, an initiative of the Australian, State and Territory Governments.
 
For further media information:  Katrina Hall 0421153046 or kathall@ozemail.com.au