Title

Alex Selenitsch: Road to Bourke.

Venues

Grahame Galleries + Editions. (11 November 2017 – 9 December 2017)

Date

(2017)

Summary

Single-artist exhibition. Located: Australia (QLD). Drawings, Objects, Books.

Web address

https://grahamegalleries.com.au/alex-selenitsch-e…

Country of context

Australia

Abstract

In 2011, Merron and I drove from Coff’s Harbour to Bourke, over the border to Cunnamulla, and then back to Brisbane. While the coastal parts of the journey were across hills and undulations, most of the territory we drove through was flat: very flat, and with very few features.

Most of the time, we sat in our car, looking towards a horizon with little shapes scattered across it. Whenever we stopped at the side of the road, we saw small bushes, bits of road-kill and lots of cotton bits. Dots at our feet, dots up ahead. In between these was the vast space of the country, land and sky.

As an architect, I am very familiar with the combination of plan and profile (or elevation) drawings, which are then to be imagined as an object or space. And here it was in the landscape. When I got back to Melbourne, I began to draw and make objects using a trapezium shape as a starting point, with the top edge as the horizon in profile, and the sloping edge for the road edge, in plan, leading to that horizon. The drawings led to objects, and to sketchbooks and a hand-made book. In the book, the lines and edges that are in the drawings are given by the alphabet or by single-line texts.

When we got to Brisbane after the drive, we had lunch in Noreen’s empty but sparkling and reconditioned gallery, along with Jan Davis and Linzi Murrie. It was the first ‘event’ in the Gallery after it had been soaked by the floods of 2011; at the same time it was a joyful end to our big U-turn in the West. My drawings and models came later, but on completion, it seemed that Noreen’s gallery was the obvious place to show the work. And here it is.

Alex Selenitsch. October2017

{Grahame Galleries + Editions media, 2017].

Last Updated

03 Aug 2024