DON'T TRUST THE ARTIST

29.10.09-28.11.09
VENUE: IVAN DOUGHERTY GALLERY, COLLAGE OF FINE ARTS, UNIVERSITY OF NSW, SYDNEY
ARTISTS: Pat Foster, Jen Berean, Richard Lewer, Rob McLeish, Geoff Newton, Simon Pericich, Jackson Slattery
CURATOR: Alexie Glass-Kantor
ASSISTANT CURATOR: Amita Kirpalani
BOOK DESIGNER: Yanni Florence 

Invited by Nick Waterlow, Director of the Ivan Dougherty Gallery (College of Fine Arts, UNSW) to curate the closing exhibition in the galleries former premises, Alexie Glass-Kantor, Director of Melbourne’s Gertrude Contemporary Art Spaces, decided to present a group exhibition of multiple shifting perspectives. 

Playfully appropriating the title from DH Lawrence, Don’t Trust The Artist explores the entanglements of artifice, suspicion, delinquency, the sacrilegious and conspiracy. It is a labyrinth of the grotesque and aggressive, tortured and oppressive interspersed with humour and surprising juxtapositions. 

Drawing attention to ideas of subterfuge within contemporary practice, the exhibition rejects the assumption that all artists embed an authoritative meaning within their work and subverts the classic assumption that every artwork has a narrative, moral or message to be unraveled and absorbed.