Melbourne Glasgow Edinburgh Cultural Exchange.
Alan Currall, DAMP, andrew Hurle, Fanni Niemi Junkola, David Noonan, Deborah Ostrow, David Rosetzky, Eva Rothschild, Dave Shrigley, Ross Sinclair, Clara Ursitti, Lyndal Walker.
All that we can know is that we are ourselves and that we cannot be other than we are or make anything that will not bear the marks of our own making.
Jack Miles
Beyond the old aporia of art and life is habitat, the immediate environment of artists constructed out of necessity in myriad lived (often habitual) responses to the world. To speak of art and life seems inappropriate when there's no longer that much difference. We guess there once was, with such an abundant genealogy for the divide; so many western artists and writers working the same nominal seam, either crossing or guarding it. They set themselves an herculean - even impossible - task to relate these incommensurable terms. Today, the resolution of art and life is a moot point, for no other reason than no-one can tell the difference or want to or needs to. It's simply the curators' or historian's or critic's reflexive trope to return to this rhetorical impasse only to suggest that it's all-of-a-sudden gone now. Sure, much of the work seems indivisible from artist's lives and environments. It's what we could call their habitat: some kind of composite construction made out of material at hand under life influences. But perhaps the work's best description is according to the open disposition of artists to any and all these influences (and not some single specious subset). Maybe it's the artist's truly social practice to just relax about classification altogether which leaves their work unqualified by historical schema and that's probably the whole point. From one perspective, contemporary art may appear in the middle of a yawning archaic crevasse but from another, the background is nothing but the rest of our lives.
Stuart Koop & Charlotte Day
Habitat is part of Morning Star, Evening Star: Melbourne Glasgow Edinburgh Cultural Exchange

Centre for Contemporary Photography
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