Gone Fishing

About

Gone Fishing is the third in an ambitious trilogy of exhibitions produced in collaboration between Flat Time House (FTHo) and the Roberts Institute of Art (RIA). Each exhibition explores a different facet of the complex network of ideas surrounding John Latham’s work in dialogue with important works from the David and Indrė Roberts Collection. The final part of the trilogy expands from the relationship between Latham and Boyle Family, drawing on both artists’ pioneering work in understanding sculpture as conceptual art and central participation in the cross-pollination of popular culture and the avant-garde. Significant works from both artists are presented alongside sculptures by contemporary artist Marlie Mul and a newly commissioned audio installation by Damien Roach.

The exhibition includes Boyle Family’s ‘Earth studies’, site-specific 3-D casts of randomly selected portions of the Earth’s surface constructed from real material collected on site combined with paint and resin. Hung vertically, the painstaking process of replication destabilises the viewer, questioning our relationship to environment and place. These are presented alongside Marlie Mul’s ‘Puddles’, perfect replicas of water collecting on pavement. Evading narrative, the low-lying sculptures revel in the intricacy of the everyday. John Latham’s ‘Gone Fishing’ plunges beat writer Alexander Trocchi’s counter-cultural novel, ‘Cain’s Book’ into a pool of blackened canvas. Latham’s titular play on words suggests a confrontation of presence with absence.

Damien Roach’s multidisciplinary practice is concerned with creative thinking, flexible modes of being, and the unfixed nature of perception, often using various pop cultural materials as accessible sites for the exploration of these ideas. For Gone Fishing, Roach has produced a new environmental sound installation, and a performance work drawn from archival research into the Boyle Family’s liquid light projections. These light shows, performed both in gallery spaces and as visual accompaniment for Soft Machine and Jimmy Hendrix, experimented with the re-presentation of the Earth’s elements, magnifying various chemical and physical reactions using projectors. Roach’s commission draws upon the sounds of these processes alongside the commonplace sounds of daily experience, presenting them estranged from their sources like disembodied apparitions, an uncanny echo of the original material. The resulting open score cyclically re-sequences these found sounds to investigate transitional states, auratic affect, and the dematerialisation of the art object.