Jennifer Mathews & Joseph Gentry
Seventh Gallery, Melbourne
5 – 20 October 2017
Skyscraper, school, shrine, slaughterhouse.
Tomb, shelter, crypt, bunker.
Architecture is both the substance and medium of authority. As Benjamin H. Bratton states, ‘there is no house without the one who claims it and there is no law, and no power in fact, without the house which it oversees.’
Symbols of desire and violence are suspended within everyday architecture, fixing abstract and discrete definitions of corporeal space into immediate surfaces, volumes, and pathways.
To romanticise decay is to delegitimize power and its physical architecture: the composition of signifiers, signs, boundaries, transit zones, everyday commodities, glass windows and iron bars that together form a general economy of retention, resentment, loss, and displacement.
Entomb and sacralize: soft security for a hard target, 2017, headless sculpture, wooden drawer, barbed wire, concrete, natural stone marble, 62 x 49.5 x 30 cm
A self-tormenting grandeur that is no doubt enjoyable, 2017, window, stainless steel, pine, 117 x 100 x 30 cm
Optimism & Futility
Curated by James Parkinson
Irene Rose, Melbourne
29 November – 23 October 2017
High effort and low reward, 2017, stainless steel, ceramic, chair back rest, pomegranate, 49 x 55 x 19 cm
Public installation as part of Signal Screen Commission
SIGNAL, Melbourne
21 August – 21 September 2017
Urban Promotions, 2017, 4 channel video, sound, 3:36 minutes