PRESS RELEASE: Emanations: Considering transmission, language and signal across time and space

Emanations
Considering transmission, language and signal across time and space

9 September – 14 October 2023

Opening: 8 September, 6–8 pm
Floor Talk: The Telepathy Project, 7 October, 3 pm

Curated by Cura8 and featuring Melanie Cobham, Annika Koops, Wade Marynowsky, Nancy Mauro-Flude, Arthur Nyakuengama, Huang Qiuyuan, Jeffrey Strayer, The Telepathy Project, Katie West and Chaohui Xie.

Through the work of ten international artists, Emanations presents multimodal materialisations spanning conceptual art, sound, performance, installation, conversation, dreamwork, calligraphic mark making and digital augmentation.

Emanations considers the fundamental need for a conduit of some kind to transmit information and experience from one being or entity to another. Accordingly, it exemplifies the necessity for some kind of object, text, utterance, gesture, sound, signal or delineation to make processes of transmission possible. The viewer is invited to receive these signals and then feel their way through experience and interpretation to contemplate the kind of vehicular medium that has made this communication possible.

Together with language, consciousness, technology and the dexterity of our opposable thumbs, art performs a central role in human experience. Looking at stories and the legacies of generational knowledges, Katie West presents a sculptural installation that uses field recordings from her home in the Kimberley in Western Australia to draw upon familial, cultural and ecological rhythms. Chaohui Xie repurposes layered delineations of social place over geological space to form curious patterns on glass panels that reflect on the ever-changing nature of national boundaries. Melanie Cobham’s objects and drawings embody curious correlations and translations between constructed worlds and organic patterns.

Arthur Nyakuengama’s work presents metal and leather wall-based objects that acknowledge communication as coded signs and where body adornment and material exuberance excites the senses and signals queer languages of connection. Nancy Mauro-Flude, as an unruly mystic, aims to circumnavigate the enigmas of automatism with an installation that conjures machinic entities and uncanny subjectivities. Non-human communication is also explored in the surreal audio-visual worlds of Wade Marynowsky, who invites the viewer into digitally augmented spaces where entities and creatures communicate ineffable signals.
The shaping of language and capacities for abstract thinking underscore Jeffrey Strayer’s complex marriages of perceptual and a conceptual aesthetics on two-dimensional surfaces. Annika Koops’ paintings reference comic book registrations of human gesture and movement to operate as proxies for affect in a time dominated by digital algorithms. Meanwhile, the meticulous brushwork of Huang Qiuyuan exemplifies the virtuosic poetic languages of the calligraphic gesture.

Cūrā8 has also invited The Telepathy Project (Veronica Kent and Sean Peoples), who work with telepathy and dreams, to devise a unique performance event on 7 October from 3pm. For Emanations they will dream on the works of fellow artists and share the results through a special artist floor talk.

In Emanations, language sheds much of its practical communicative role to offer a space both connected to and liberated from rational sense in a flight from interpretation. It is in this realm that new connective tissues form to produce new worlds of contradiction. Here, affects extend upon knowledge or meaning to register as sensorial emanations.

 
About Project8

Project8 is a contemporary art space in Melbourne’s CBD dedicated to promoting speculative poetic and material innovation through exhibitions and related events. It utilises the multimodal aesthetic languages of contemporary art to experientially deemphasise differences and contestations grounded in language, politics and culture. Project8 is committed to the promotion and development of discursive exchange, collaboration and partnerships between Australian, Chinese and international artists, researchers and communities actively engaging with contemporary art.

CONTACT

Project8 Gallery
Wurundjeri Country
Level 2, 417 Collins St.
Melbourne, VIC
AUSTRALIA

11am–6pm
Wednesday–Saturday
or by appointment
+61 3 9380 8888

More information
www.project8.gallery
Instagram and Facebook @project8gallery
Press and additional promotional images contact Honi Ryan: [email protected]