Curated by Alexie Glass

Supported by The Myer Foundation, Lyn Williams AM, and Yanni Florence

Eroticism, viscerality, and turbulent emotional and dreamlike states were mobilised by five artists working across a variety of media for Octopus 4: More Real Than Life. More Real Than Life was the fourth installment of the annual Octopus series of exhibitions at Gertrude Contemporary Art Spaces. Inaugurated in 2000, the Octopus series presents the work of significant emerging and established artists, and current tendencies in art practice locally, nationally, and for the first time in Octopus 4, internationally.¨Developed by guest curator Alexie Glass, Octopus 4: More Real Than Life featured the work of Del Kathryn Barton (NSW), Cherry Hood (NSW), James Lynch (VIC), Monika Tichacek (NSW), and Charlie White (USA). Octopus 4: More Real Than Life evoked those parts of ourselves that are more vivid, more uncanny, more real than the everyday. Our dreams, consumption, longings, fantasies, insecurities, sex, bodies, and desires were collided, contorted and confronted in large-scale photographs, full-wall sized film projections, video, installation, painting and work on paper. The scenes of More Real Than Life were all beautifully constructed, dazzling images and vignettes that may have appeared distant from the everyday, but evoked a recognition of our innermost desires and fearful imaginings.¨From the uncanny visions of adolescence in Archibald Prize-winning artist Cherry Hood’s oversized oil paintings, to Los Angeles-based photographer Charlie White’s pneumatic blondes, interlopers and casual studs, to Monika Tichacek’s video-based forays into modern camp glamour and medical mutation, the works in More Real Than Life were frequently highly-strung, intense, and personal, subjecting artists and viewers alike to an unreasonable degree of intimacy and vulnerability.¨