Garden Of Skin

About

The garden is a constructed space that exists in almost every culture, a site of mental and
physical sustenance. In part, the garden is a location of aesthetic creativity, expressing a
human desire to control impulses that are uncanny, emotive responses to an environment we
cannot fully understand. Like the landscape outside the gates of the garden our bodies are not
separate from this space, simply an aspect of it. It is in this way that each of the artists in
GARDEN OF SKIN explore the social, sensual and poetic aspects of the landscapes in which
their bodies inhabit and are subject too.
The skin of plants, of animals and of the earth is the first physical location one witnesses the
symptoms of misuse and disease. The vulnerability of this surface can be metaphorically
understood in each artist’s work, regardless of medium as an aesthetic epidermis, presented to
the naked eye of the viewer. It is the exterior that counts in this context; and not superficially.
Much of the work in this exhibition revels in the beauty of texture, colour, form and
ornamentation, coupled with a depth of narrative and seriousness subverting the interpretation
of the ‘decorative’ as non-functional or superfluous.
As cultivators in the context of the white cube, or in this case, the more domestic setting of
Angus-Hughes Gallery, a space emerges for the intersection of ideas that informs a cross
pollination of meaning. We as humans experience our environment in several key
phenomenological ways: through scent, sight, sound, taste and touch. This exhibition features
work from artists in Australia, Canada, India, Italy, Mexico, the UK and the US, each revealing
an articulation of these experiential views as vastly different, both physically and politically;
ranging in topic from sexuality and gender to race, the effects of colonialism, ideas of
embodiment, ecology and aesthetics.
-Zachari Logan, Curator.