DR AMBER SMITH
CURATOR TALK: WORLDING
SAT 8 JUN 3.00PM
REGISTRATION NOT REQUIRED
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Closed captioned and Auslan interpretation version available upon request.
Platform Arts is wheelchair-accessible via our Gheringhap St entrance. Unlocked, accessible bathrooms are available on both ground and first floors.
For accessibility enquiries, please contact us at hello@platformarts.org.au
Before the exhibition officially opens to the public, join us for a floor talk with Worlding curator Amber Smith.
Under the curation of Platform Arts’ Dr Amber Smith, the ‘worlding’ practices proposed in this exhibition reflect how artists un/build worlds and re/imagine the world as-it-is, with consideration to alternate realities, memory fields, truth-telling, and material-semiotic worlds. The mediums span video and digital media as well as object-based and archival practices, foregrounding First Nations and Diasporic perspectives, which together examine how everyday objects and technologies infiltrate artistic practice by co-opting and subverting these materialities.
These central themes culminated from Amber’s 2022 PhD: ‘Collecting, Display, and World-Building in Contemporary Art Practice: Putting the Wunderkammer back to work’. This research saw Amber investigate and unravel the more unconscious motivations behind object-based, accumulative art practices. Through Worlding, Amber invites viewers to contemplate how one exists among, between, and surrounded by material networks of things.
“By confronting our own attempts to world-build, we gain insight into the purpose of worlding being about identity and creating an environment that signals back to us—sometimes unconsciously—our identity and essentials like security and self-actualisation. We like to know that our immediate world meets our needs and desires.”
— Curator Amber Smith
With thanks to the Estates of Katthy Cavaliere, Stano Filko, and Alex Rizkalla, through the AGNSW Artist Archives.
This project has been supported by a City of Greater Geelong Community Grant.
Check out the full program of Worlding events in our What’s On section.
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Amber Smith is an artist, curator, producer and writer working within the sphere of objects, thing theory and collection practices. They are interested in how these operate as a counter-practice to - or a complimentary practice of - digital and new media streams.
Amber Smith holds a PhD from Deakin University in the School of Communication and Creative Arts. They also hold 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.
