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ANDREW BEST
Paradise 23 October to 29 November Andrew Best is an artist, curator and writer, graduate of the SA School of Art and co-founder of the artist run initiative, Downtown Art Space. He is one of the newer Adelaide artists to be recognised nationally with exhibitions scheduled during 03/04 in Perth, Darwin and Melbourne. His work fuses personal and pop-cultural references within reconstructed elements from the contemporary urban landscape. In this exhibition, Andrew creates a large-scale installation that draws from the various narratives that have been built around the notion of 'paradise', from Light's utopian Adelaide plan, to notions of paradise from books and film. REVIEW Andrew Best's installation was a simulacrum of a notional non-site somewhere in Adelaide - an alley, an abandoned industrial space. It was 'furnished' with wrecked and overturned photocopiers, some bits of chipped masonry, weeds, Nitrous Oxide capsules, a potplant. The weeds (all hand made but successfully illusionistic) grew in the interstircies of the cement grid of the gallery floor and along the walled edge and by this highlighting of geometry and the reproducible units of urban space, suggested the in-principle' extension of the space beyond the gallery. It was an everyday Adelaide, alright, of drugs and dereliction, euphoria and fear and boredom. The spot lighting of some of its features created a nocturnal feel. A ghoulish head appeared beneath the intermittently flashing workings of one photocopier - an allusion to aspects of Adelaide's reputation for gruesome murders but also to the junk ethos favoured by many of the young users one supposed the space implied. Paradise was a further extension of Best's forays into notions and modes of the narrative: earlier exhibitions had made straightforward simulacrum of a more focused event and urban myth, an allegorized depiction of schematized romance (beer barrels rolling to a structure emulating Donkey Kong) and, in this case, a work that partook of both generalising allegorical treatment and the literal-or-simulated. Ken Bolton PUBLICATION Invitation: 140 x 70mm black and white invitation Catalogue: A5 colour bi-fold card . Essay by Ken Bolton; 8 colour images by the artist. MEDIA Wendy Walker "Cherished off-cuts of family life" The Advertiser, 26 November 2003, p 107 Stephanie Radok, The Adelaide Review, No 243, December 2003. Chris Reid, Broadsheet vol 33 #1, 2004, page 59 Full page image reproduction: Artlink Vol 24 No 1, 2004 |
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above: documentation: installation details |
Documentation Photography by Peter Farrow |