Project15: DEATH | LIFE

Held in February each year, Anna Pappas Gallery's annual Project exhibition has become a stand out event of the Melbourne art scene.

Designed to promote artists that push boundaries, this exhibition will showcase the talents of eleven diverse artists, brought together under the curatorship of Sebastian Goldspink. Goldspink is best known for founding Alaska Projects, a space he opened in 2011 in an abandoned mechanics office in a Kings Cross car park which has hosted numerous exhibitions and arts projects.

The catalyst for this project is a short prose text written by the curator, under the title DEATH | LIFE, in which the artists are provoked to respond directly to, or diverge from in exploration of common ideas, creating works that are conceptually linked by themes of loss, memory, joy and rebirth. The title of the text, as well as the exhibition, is itself subversive, as it destabilises accepted ideas of life and death as linear. Rather, death and life exist cyclically, in a form of repetition and ceaselessness. Instead of coming across as melancholic, however, the exhibition is essentially romantic and bittersweet; the human condition itself, sentimentality, and the idealistic become manifest.

The practices of the eleven artists vary greatly, and in fact are not held together by methodology, but rather thematically. The conceptual element of this project is crucial to its existence; not only is it part of a larger conceptual curatorial venture undertaken by the curator, it is the concepts provided by Goldspink’s prose that link the works of these artists together. Many of the artists in this exhibition have previously explored ideas and themes complementary to this project, however some have not, presenting the opportunity for artistic expansion and exploration.

Artists Artemis Potamianou (Athens), Daniel Hollier (Sydney), Kate Scardifield (Sydney), Katie Lee (Melbourne), Kenny Pittock (Melbourne), Jason Wing (Sydney), Michaela Gleave (Sydney), Philjames (Sydney), Sam Fagan (Melbourne), Samuel Hodge (Sydney) and Tully Arnot (Melbourne), brought together under the curatorship of Sebastian Goldspink.