CARLA CESCON, MIKALA DWYER, GRZEGORZ GAWRONSKI, RACHEL SCOTT, TINA HAVELOCK STEVENS

ALTERBEAST
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This eclectic accumulation was the coming together of five artists from Sydney, Carla Cescon, Mikala Dwyer, Grzegorz Gawronski, Rachel Scott and Tina Havelock Stevens. Together these artists collaborated to create what can only be called...an Alterbeast.

Cloaked in a shroud of mystery and embedded deeply within traditions of the macabre, Dwyer explains the narrative of their collaboration thus: “We all met in a Polish orphanage and swore on our graves that when we grew up we would all be artists and live in Sydney and come together to express the demons of our very disturbed childhoods.” Extending from this cloaked history, Alterbeast extrapolated on the individual practices’ of each artist, dissecting and connecting the intersections that bleed between artistic practice and the everyday.

Flipping in and out between fantasy and reality, the five artists traversed a vast and varied subjective terrain in this exhibition. Mikala Dwyer, Carla Cescon and Tina Havelock Stevens went treasure hunting through Coogee and Kings Cross “in search of the pumpkin bus that carries the poo zombies” charting their depraved course with a video camera. The sound track for their zombie quest is none other than a nude drum solo by Havelock Stevens. Rachel Scott’s work became a self-contained universe replete with its own constellations and time zones that vacillate wildly between control and flux. Whereas Gawronski’s project for Alterbeast employs chemical reactions to generate forms that ‘self organise’ into what has been referred to as an “order for free”.

The exhibition as a whole seemed to adhere to an anarchic, self determined logic. The works, however disparate in aesthetic, are united by their collective sense of the other-worldly, the unhomely and the celestial. In summing up the contents of this amorphous congregation, Mikala Dwyer describes the exhibition as “5 stolen objects, one for each finger; 5 secrets hidden and embedded in the holes of your eyes.”