Calendar

Calendar comprises a substantial body of work at a major international venue. Calendar (days are numbered) turns a wall planner into the four walls of a studio. Looking from outside in, you peer into the space of the artist’s studio through open walls. Look from the inside out and you see the gallery’s constructed walls framing the work on display. By shifting the visitor’s perspective from gallery goer to artist with a single step, the installation serves to reveal not just that gallery and studio have distinct and competing claims on the subject of art, but that both are bounded by conventions of their own making. Similar to Calendar (days are numbered) in both overall form and constituent material (hot-dip galvanised steel, but here solid bar rather than box-section) Dog Pen (for cats) served both as stand-alone sculptural proposition and teaser to the main event. The piece was presented as if for the city’s cats, who might come and go freely through its walls, unlike the imagined canine resident. The work was in neighbourly conversation with the eponymous buoys of Buoy Park. Among these not-art objects presented as if works of art, here was an artwork disguising itself as no such thing. Each piece is an essay about constraint and freedom both in terms of our actions and our understandings of such actions. As if the studio, the museum, the very subject of art might be thought of as an open prison with volunteer inmates constantly dreaming up clever new plans for escape.