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DENISE KUM
untitled exhibition 14 Febuary - 6 April 2002 Denise Kum's untitled installation, the EAF's Festival-period show, was one of our most successful: genuinely interesting to a great many artists, and popular with the public as spectacle, experience and as occasion for thought and imagination. Attendances were correspondingly high, with a great deal of word-of-mouth approval from visitors to the gallery. Kum is a (UK-based) New Zealand artist, her practice involving the use of high-technology synthetic materials and substances (oils, commercial lubricants and polymers) to explore modes of display and cultural meaning. Kum's project was designed to raise important issues around concepts of waste, utility and the development of synthetic materials; the range of cultural meanings attached to specific materials and processes; the meanings of methods of display, decor and design; the metaphoric capacities of bacteriality and virulence, mutation and toxicity. The installation read as a shape-shifting landscape: it simulated both a kind of industrial wasteland of pollutant debris and mutant, viral growth and was also shrilly pretty, in part resembling a contemplative Japanese Garden - leading the viewer to admire wistfully the lily-pad shapes of pink and blue and white that had previously caused a shudder. A walkway ran in serpentine fashion through this landscape of vaseline, wax, hand-cleaner and organic hard plastic shapes. An artificial paradise, utopian in its cutely pretty colours it was also a sci-fi dystopia - an ecological accident, barren, poisonous, hostile. In a small booklet published by the EAF for the occasion of the exhibition Kum, interviewed by Chris Chapman (who, as our previous Director, had programmed the show), discussed the nature of her work. Denise Kum's time here was also an artist's residency - besides working intensively with a number of younger artists in setting up the installation Kum stayed on a week beyond the exhibition's opening in residence at the University of South Australia where she was much engaged with Honours and Postgraduate students, discussing their work and ideas and giving a talks on her own practice. Denise also gave an artist's talk at the EAF on Monday 6th March. Denise Kum's exhibition was generously sponsored by Plastic's Granulating Services and Remnant Research Australia, with the Art School of South Australia assisting her residency in Adelaide. Ken Bolton An A5 twenty-eight page hand made catalogue designed by the artist with text by Chris Chapman was produced to accompany the project. |
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above: documentation: installation details |
Documentation Photography by Alan Cruickshank |