FROM A TO W AND BACK AGAIN-3-2.docx

Review of Andy Warhol|Ai Wei Wei at the National Gallery of Victoria in 2015

2011

PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art, 2010

2013

O’Riley’s essay ‘From A to B and back’ focuses on the notion of a distributed work comprising a number of elements from which the viewer is free to draw connections. It considers syntactical terms such as hypotaxis and parataxis as ways of generating, thinking about or looking at artworks. These terms provide useful ways to reflect on the lateral forms of art practice. The article’s significance rests in the way that it unites seemingly disparate images and ideas to reflect on how narrative, and the construction of interpretation, are active elements within one’s response to a work. This essay is an outcome of O’Riley’s research into Printed Matter, a project reflecting upon narrative, uncertainty and de-familiarisation in the reading of artworks. For example, O’Riley’s book Twenty-Seven Kilometres (2013) explores the notion of a distributed work in relation to his experience of looking at CERN in Geneva and is based on photographs taken by O’Riley during the final stages of work on...

2014

Dressed in a handsome waistcoat, the White Rabbit is running out of time, hastily scurrying about and panting to the sound of each tick from his elegant pocket watch. Alice, in her curiosity, eagerly chases after him. Caught in the intrigue of the chase, Alice has no time to hesitate as she falls down the rabbit hole… Yet there is an art to falling down the rabbit hole. Somewhere between the relentless chase and the unexpected fall is a potent collision of inner and outer creative worlds. A fantastical chaos between the personal and the social, intuition and logic, sub-consciousness and consciousness, fact and fiction, sense and nonsense. It is at this enchanted moment that a complete immersion in the creative process takes over… and all sense of time is lost. This loss of time carries more meaning than just being immersed in creative curiosity. It signifies the disorientation of the protagonist while simultaneously acting as a narration device in disorienting the reader. That is, encountering a surreal world disorients Alice. As she becomes curiously immersed in this world, she loses the ability to decipher reality from fiction. In doing so, Alice transports the reader into the same dilemma, shifting them from familiar to unknown territories of their imagination. In short, this disorientation process suspends the reader's disbelief. This notion of creative curiosity is the central curatorial premise for the Down the Rabbit Hole exhibition. Initiating a unique cross-institutional collaboration between Queensland College of Art (QCA), Griffith University, Brisbane, and the University of Southern Queensland (USQ), Toowoomba, Down the Rabbit Hole showcases both two-and three-dimensional works by twenty-two emerging artists: Kathy Appleby,

CubaCounterpoints, December Issue, 2016

A major retrospective of Cuban painter Wifredo Lam (Sagua la Grande, 1902 – Paris, 1992) has just berthed at Tate Modern in London, weighing in at more than two hundred works and neatly splayed in chronological order across eleven rooms. After a season at both the Pompidou in Paris and Reina Sofía in Madrid, viewers may now step into this sprawling survey featuring Lam’s proclamation writ large on the wall: “My painting is an act of decolonization, not in a physical sense but in a mental one.” The oft-cited quote fires this curatorial endeavour, delving into the fringes of art history’s canon in a bid to weave more plural, or polycentric, histories of global modernism. This is in concurrence with the retrospectives of the Uruguayan modern artist Joaquín Torres-García at MoMA in New York, and the Portuguese modernist Amadeo de Souza-Cardoso at the Grand Palais in Paris. These institutional redresses are long overdue, and the political moment is ripe for critical reappraisal. In the wake of the postcolonial turn, a wave of revisionary scholarship has thrust Lam’s work into new relief: Lam is a poster boy for diasporic displacement, cross-cultural hybridity, and black cosmopolitanism in the early twentieth century. Link: https://cubacounterpoints.com/archives/4636