Opening Event: Thursday 20 July 5pm to 7pm
21 July 2023 at 10:00 am – 12 August 2023 at 5:00 pm
Opening hours: Wednesday to Friday 10am to 5pm, Saturday 12noon to 5pm
MADA Gallery
Building D
Caulfield East VIC 3145
Australia
Threads is the second exhibition in the MADA Gallery curated by Chantelle Mitchell and Jaxon Waterhouse as part of The line is life itself. The exhibition features work by Chris Bond, Serena Bonson, Janet Burchill and Jennifer McCamley, Simon Denny, Diena Georgetti, IC-98, Regina de Miguel, John Nixon, Susan Norrie, Raquel Ormella, Patrick Pound, Koji Ryui, Warlimpirrnga Tjapaltjarri, Pam Virada.
As the second exhibition in the series The line is life itself , Threads considers the generative capacity of the line through the framework of the thread. Weaving into and across the Monash University Collection, Threads presents these holdings alongside commissioned and recent work from geographically and conceptually distant practitioners that illuminates the connectivity and entanglement of matter and materiality.
Like the web of a spider, a tangle in a child’s hair or a mycorrhizal network encircling the globe, threads materialise and give rise to relations, markers of contact and enmeshment. It is the filaments and fibres, alongside the act of their knotting and enmeshment that anthropologist and contemporary scholar Tim Ingold highlights as being central to the taxonomy of the line, and further, critical within the frame of life itself. Within this conceptual and material frame, the things and objects which make up the world are not rendered as “externally bounded entit[ies]” but rather as knots of constituent parts, knots whose trails entangle with the threads that comprise the knots of other forms.
Threads is concerned with connectivity, the diffuse and glaringly obvious ways in which things are tied together across time and space. Seemingly disparate, the works presented here are united by form, content, context or speculation and invite their conceptual and material underpinnings to be assembled and reassembled in endless formations. As Ingold states, the world is a “total movement of becoming which builds itself into the forms we see, and in which each form takes shape in continuous relation to those around it” - it is this which allows the distinction between animate and inanimate to dissolve, for the entirety of life to writhe and wriggle in unison or sympathy.
The line is life itself
The pen stroke, the path, the horizon - the line is a generous thing.
Ubiquitous, it moves in any and all directions; expanding, multiplying, tangling and recreating itself across personal, material, physical and speculative frames. Within these it becomes an ordering principle, a means of giving shape to the fundamental structures of material and life. As a tool or vessel, the line makes sense, makes meaning or strikes it out. Through the line, we can connect disparate nodes, follow their entanglement or separate them forever.
Drawing from the work of Tim Ingold, The line is life itself considers the expansive possibility of the line as a means of constitution and connection. Adopting Ingold’s taxonomy of the line—trace, thread, surface—the three exhibitions comprising The line is life itself attempt an engagement with the line beyond simple subject, object, or stylistic register. Rather, each exhibition recognises the line as part of a thrumming web of connectivity, an interweaving, or an unbounded entanglement, as evidenced in material and scholarly practice.
Moving beyond mere microhistory, these three exhibitions consider the connective possibilities of the line through diverse material practice, in order to develop productive frames for linear inquiry. As Ingold writes, ‘Indeed, what is a thing or a person but a tying together of the lines?’ The line is life itself considers the constitution and implication of connecting these lines and in doing so, how this gives shape to, and facilitates the navigation of, the world.