𝙁𝙀𝙧𝙒 / 𝙂𝙧𝙀π™ͺ𝙣𝙙 / by Kirrily Jordan

Collage of both Clementine McIntosh and Jonathon Zalakos working in their studios. Image courtesy of the artists.

Clementine McIntosh & Jonathon Zalakos


Gallery 3

Sunday 26 November – Sunday 10 December

Opening Saturday 25 November 6-8pm

Zalakos and McIntosh were awarded this exhibition by M16 last year through the Australian National University's School of Art and Design's Emerging Artist Support Scheme. Their practices converge as enquiries on the relationship between the human subject and their environment. Surface is employed to explore the formulation of both the artist and the artwork, while engaging these labels as interchangeable - as we are just as much made by our environments as we tend toward making them.

McIntosh’s series of painted works is a continuation of her circular material practice. Composed of found surfaces, old studio and house paint, napkins, discarded artworks, and friends borrowed spray paints; she uses painting to familiarise herself to the material’s place-based and interpersonal histories. Embodied in the paintings is a critique on the dominant nonlinear hierarchies of waste and its influence on our entanglements with local communities and ecosystems. Recycling and gifting for the making of these paintings occurred across Wiradjuri/Wailwan/Kamilaroi country Gilgandra NSW, Ngunnawal/Ngambri country Canberra ACT, Barkindji country Wilcannia NSW and Gadigal/Wangal country Sydney NSW.

Generally through his work, Jonathon pursues a psychoanalytic understanding of objects and the disciplines concerned with producing them: Art, design and craft. Specifically in this exhibition, Jonathon explores how his unconscious precipitates through the process of engraving a series of abstract forms over the faces of many signet rings, resembling the iconic ink blotting of Rorschach’s tests.

In a contemporary western context, jewellery stands out amongst craft disciplines as a cultural practice that itself represents no meaning, but acts as a scaffold for other meanings to settle into relation. In this capacity, jewellery is a nexus of social organisation, generating signifiers of positionality in regard to class, political, sexual, and gender orientation, and so much more. Interpretation of each abstraction is coloured both by this context and the unconscious of the audience, enabling the possibility of an unsuspecting jewel to resonate as deeply personal.

The exhibition offers a meditation on the relationship we have on our environment - in both the effects we enact, as well as the effects that are enacted upon us.