Surfaces

The last in The line is life itself exhibition series, Surfaces addresses questions of boundedness and entanglement through the motif of the line. With particular attention as to what lines are inscribed into and onto, the exhibition reveals and deconstructs surfaces in all their multiplicities. Anthropologist Tim Ingold, providing the throughline of this exhibition series, positions the surface as significant for what it discloses, identifying the surface as a “primary condition for generating meaning,” an interfacial mediator. This exhibition navigates a path through these ideas, with works attentive to the material conditions of surfaces, and the ways in which they are transformed by thought and action.

The line is life itself considers the expansive possibility of the line as a means of constitution and connection. Adopting Ingold’s taxonomy of the line—trace, thread, surface—the three exhibitions comprising The line is life itself attempt an engagement with the line beyond simple subject, object, or stylistic register. Rather, each exhibition recognises the line as part of a thrumming web of connectivity, an interweaving, or an unbounded entanglement, as evidenced in material and scholarly practice.

Artists: Josh Carlier, Mitchel Cumming, Brodie Ellis, Susan Jacobs, Daryl Lindsay, Tracey Moffatt, Tom Nicholson, Studio Folder, Joseph Williams Jungurrayi, Rupert Betheras and Lindsay Nelson Jakamarra, and Afghan War Rugs (1980 to present) with accompanying text by Polly Stanton.