ARMANDO CHANT, SADHBHA COCKBURN, JUSTINE ROCHE, ALI TAHAYORI and BELINDA YEE
retrograde // anterograde
ARMANDO CHANT, SADHBHA COCKBURN, JUSTINE ROCHE, ALI TAHAYORI and BELINDA YEE
retrograde//anterograde is a contemporary investigation into the human experience of time, perception and materiality. Illustrating the pivotal apex between past and future, this group show brings together multidisciplinary artists: Armando Chant, Sadhbha Cockburn, Justine Roche, Ali Tahayori and Belinda Yee to articulate the nuanced space of becoming.
Using installation, photography, video and drawing as tools, these artists investigate a spectrum of dichotomous relationships. From anticipatory environmental grief to the tactility of time, transitions in psyche following trauma, to materialising the void between the material and immaterial, retrograde//anterograde reveals the greyscale precipices on which these artists practise.
In a series of dye sublimated photographs which explore the transformative nature of landscape, artist Armando Chant unifies the abstract and figurative to illustrate the inherent potential of the in-between as a place, space and site of imaginative engagement. Drawing on and into photographic imagery, Chant demonstrates a nascent state of emergence and becoming, exploring the liminal space between erasure and negation, and ultimately questioning the dynamic equilibrium of image and surface.
Investigating the dichotomous relationship between nature and humankind, Sadhbha Cockburn uses expanded methods of drawing and sculpture to consider the traumatic severing of the human body from the materials and places around us. Her work considers the notion of anticipatory environmental grief as a process of temporal overlap inherent to our contemporary condition in the era of the Anthropocene. Eulogetic, her process-based practice uses experiences of bereavement, bushfires, and the body to mourn for the palliation of the planet.
Through process-led research, Justine Roche explores multiplicities of perspectives together with how memory, culture, personal experience and photography influence the way we perceive the world. She uses the visual idiosyncrasies of alternative photographic methods, and their resultant imperfections and haunting qualities, to explore the passing of time, ways of seeing and how the familiar can be transformed into something uncertain. Translating the Japanese philosophy of wabi sabi in the small ephemeral details of the landscape, Roche presents layered works that explore the space between the material and undefinable.
Belinda Yee is an interdisciplinary artist who uses diverse media to explore and reframe notions of time. She uses video, drawing and installation to bring awareness to the ways time is understood and experienced. Through her drawing practice, Yee explores the relationship between the process of drawing and the way materials and situations perform their inherent temporality. Belinda grounds her research in the philosophies and physics of time, drawing specifically from the teachings of thirteenth century Buddhist scholar Dōgen, in that she approaches drawing as a way of Being-Time.
Ali Tahayori draws upon his cultural heritage to explore various modes of representation. He incorporates the traditional Iranian art and craft of Āine-Kāri to create prototypes that convert the two-dimensional image into immersive light space. Oscillating between revelation and concealment, abstraction and figuration, his work questions the image-focused contemporary culture and invites the viewer to nuanced ways of seeing.
A synthesis of these diverse and divergent practices, retrograde//anterograde will be an indulgent oscillation of light, charcoal, graphite and glass that creates an in-depth and personal experience of the evolution of now.
