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MOMENTUM AiR
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15 August – 16 September 2017
For Berlin Art Week 2017 MOMENTUM presents:
Hole Within the Whole
Installation & Performance by Hobart Hughes
8 September – 8 October 2017
OPENING 8 September @ 7-10pm
MOMENTUM AiR Open Studio
Performance & Artist Talk with Hobart Hughes
10 September @ 5-6pm
@ MOMENTUM
Kunstquartier Bethanien
Mariannenplatz 2, Berlin
ARTIST BIO
Hobart Hughes [aka John Hughes] (b. 1954) is an Australian artist, filmmaker, sculptor, painter, animator, musician and performer, active since the early 1980s. Since 1995, Hobart Hughes has been a lecturer at COFA, the College of Fine Art in Sydney, Australia. Hughes’s work is marked by a poetic wistfulness combining gentle humour, poetry and the body in motion.
From 1984 to 1988 Hughes was the co-founder [with Bruce Currie] and performer with the multimedia arts/theatre group Even Orchestra whose events incorporated music, film, puppetry and performance art in a variety of settings. While producing short animated films in both Super 8 and 16mm such as Germ of an Idea [1984] and Crust [1987] and the short drama Public Knowhow [1985] [nominated for an Australian Film Institute Award for Best Short Drama] Hughes also animated and directed music videos including Let’s Cook [1982], Close Again [1983], So Strong [1985] for the band Mental as Anything and for Laughing Clown’s Eternally Yours [1984]. The music video for Let’s Cook was later screened at the Museum of Modern Art, New York. During the 1990s Hughes produced a number of web projects including A History of Walking [1996] while also producing short films such as Dark Aisle and Because You Can [both 1992] that were screened on SBS Television. Hughes work during the 2000’s continued to explore his interests in sculpture and installation, many works featuring video and performance components such as Epiphany, a video installation at Ivan Doherty Gallery in 2007, and Placed, at Damien Minton Gallery, 2008. Single channel film/video works such as The Wind Calls Your Name [2004] demonstrated Hughes’s ability to carry his trademark concerns into new media. In 2008 his animated short Removed was featured in the exhibition Figuring Landscapes at Tate Modern.
ARTIST STATEMENT – RESIDENCY PROJECT:
Imprinted, Part 1: Hole Within The Whole
During his Residency at MOMENTUM, Hobart Hughes is developing the first part of a major installation/performance work entitled “Imprinted”. Through performance, sculpture and animation, the work explores an allegorical rift in space-time.
The artist writes: “When the mind disengages from conscious thought, what happens to all the energy that was previously occupied with running a myriad narratives and emotions? For the purposes of this work, I call this energy a wormhole. The structure of the work is a kind of “art collider”, derived from an absence or void in the perception of reality. As unconscious connections form or break apart, awareness can expand around everyday events and bend consciousness so as to imbue space with greater or lesser significance. The work explores how narrative forms and reforms around these ruptures.
The project comprises video, video installation, animation, sculpture, narrative and performance by creating a series of apertures or holes, both physical and metaphoric. I try to create works that are held in a liminal position where contradictory positions, mentalities, narratives or realities may be explored simultaneously. This is not something that I apply to the work, it is inherently part of my perception and method.
Having animation as part of my practice has made me even more acutely aware of the ability to replicate a space while constructing a viewer consciousness. I have always perceived animation as a kind of consciousness mapping, in the sense of ideas mapped into space via sequences on a time molecular level (of the single frame). Animation is by default a reconstruction of space/time through a prism of pattern and context. The term I’d like to use is ‘Speculative Kinematics’”.
– Hobart Hughes