The Beach – Nicky Broekhuysen / Joseph L. Griffiths

About

The Beach is an exhibition of site-specific works by Nicky Broekhuysen [Berlin] and Joseph L. Griffiths [Melbourne], brought together by Berlin based, Melbourne born curator, Sarah E. Davies. The exhibition takes Guy Debord’s poetic adage «Sous les pavés, la plage!» [Beneath the paving stones, the beach!], as a starting point to consider the significance of the beach and its potential in our current social, political and material environment. 
 
Broekhuysen works with the binary numbers 1 and 0, hand stamped onto paper, objects, environments and cities to shape complex organic worlds of data, information and meaning. Binary numbers, coded, carry information. By re-appropriating and scrambling the code the artist shifts its meaning, forming and perpetuating new connections and perspectives. Just as a marble tile is in part made up of sand particles, and is a natural formation utilised to form civic structures, it can similarly be returned at any moment to the Beach. 
 
Coming directly from time spent at the British School at Rome’s residency, where the artist engaged directly with archaeologists and their site work, Griffith’s work condenses the ancient and the present, the natural and the cultural, growth and decay. His Fountains assemble travertine, marble, water, moss, light and sound to form an ecosystem – a fragile network of relations between water, the geological formation of travertine and the acoustic territory of church bells, with cycles of entropy and regrowth.
 
Centrum's exhibition is the first iteration of The Beach, with the second planned at BUS Projects, in Melbourne Australia in January 2017. This project has been assisted by the Australian Government through the Australia Council for the Arts, its arts funding and advisory body.