AMBER SMITH
CONSTELLATIONS
OPENS 10 DEC, 6.00PM
EXHIBITION OPEN 9AM - 5PM WEEKDAYS
CLOSES 17 DEC, 5.00PM
FREE
IMPORTANT INFORMATION
From Monday 23 November 2021, all patrons over the age of 12 and 2 months must show proof of their COVID-19 vaccination status as a condition of entry. Before you arrive, please make sure you have added your COVID-19 digital certificate to the Service Victoria app or bring printed proof of vaccination with you. You can find more details about how to add your certificate by visiting coronavirus.vic.gov.au
PLATFORM ARTS IS WHEELCHAIR ACCESSIBLE VIA GHERINGHAP STREET ENTRANCE.
FOR ACCESSIBILITY BOOKINGS PLEASE DIRECTLY CONTACT HELLO@PLATFORMARTS.ORG.AU
Constellations is an investigation into the methodologies, functions and thresholds of collections, display and world-building within contemporary art. It speaks to the interconnected and multifarious nature of things, and through diagrammatic practices, it addresses the individual’s constant battle against the inevitable dispersal and (dis/re)organisation of these things. Looking to material culture as a mass infinite network of adjacent and cosmic associations, it applies the language of archives and the Wunderkammer to communicate the complex and often arbitrary taxonomic systems that we use to control and understand the world we live in — and the objects that fill it.
Constellations draws on a diverse range of references across history, culture and art, using language, image and object to represent connections in the collection. These images function in a feedback loop – simultaneously creating and destroying elegant musings and clusterfucks of information – colliding, intersecting, diverging and dispersing. They also postulate on how a collection practice can operate in an increasingly digital and non-physical landscape.
By becoming the rag-picker of fringe culture, anti-capitalist collating and the fields of the autodidacts, Smith comments on contemporary culture’s fascination with information, organisation and narrative. Through subverting these systems, they contemplate on the individual’s place within society and the role that objects, semiology and myth play in meaning-making processes. Now more than ever we are aware of the content that surrounds us — material/digital, subject/object, human/thing — and the transcendence of this content.
Amber Smith is an artist, curator, producer and writer working within the sphere of objects, thing theory and collection practices. They are a current PhD candidate at Deakin University in the School of Communication and Creative Arts. Amber Smith holds a Bachelor of Design Arts (Visual Arts) from the Australian Academy of Design and a First-Class Honours Degree in Creative Arts at Deakin University. Amber is the Curator at Platform Arts and an Academic at Lasalle College International, Melbourne (LCIM) and Deakin University.
Constellations is the final outcome of Amber Smith’s PhD at Deakin University.