Lust for Life

Artists involved: Geoff Parr, Amanda Davies, Nancy Mauro-Flude, Matt Warren, Denise Ava Robinson, Joel Crosswell, Anthony Johnson.

Media:digital media, textiles, photography, sculpture, installation, painting.

'lust for life' brings together artists who engage with materials, processes and concepts from life and the real world, and are driven by a hunger, a curiosity, a lust to expand on the stuff that defines our being... - Curator, Lucy Bleach

Early this year an opportunity arose for CAST to present an additional exhibition within the 2009 CAST gallery program. Program Committee member Lucy Bleach (a well-known Tasmanian sculptor and installation artist) seized this moment to embark on her first curatorial project. The nature and timing of this unexpected opportunity intrinsically shaped her curatorial premise.

It’s said that Iggy Pop and David Bowie wrote, recorded and mixed the 1977 album Lust for Life in just 8 days. Whilst there was a longer time frame in which to develop this exhibition, it shares that same spirit of creative immediacy. lust for life draws together 7 local artists who work with vitality to embrace the spark of the moment, and who accept their complicity in the point of connection between their art work and the world.

Sculptor Joel Crosswell processes the emotion of personal experience through his hauntingly beautiful mythical creatures, while Amanda Davies’ energetic monochromes show how memory and desire tend to overtake truth and reality. Driven by a guilty need to find uses for neglected materials, the actions of Anthony Johnson throw open the meaning of being [an artist] in the world. In contrast Nancy Mauro-Flude’s gritty video and installation digs down into the ‘rot and beauty of contemporary daily life’1 and its paraphernalia.

Since 1 January 2009 Denise Ava Robinson has collected street detritus and her own leftovers to make daily ‘parcels’; filters holding the unsightly sediments of daily ritual and the urban landscape. The prints of Geoff Parr draw on older imagery from Tasmania’s West – a site of many grand schemes since white settlement – and reacts to the “preposterous reality” that has resulted from those once alluring dreams. Matt Warren’s intense video installation depicts the artist drawing a breath for every year he has lived.

We are reminded that even with the most vigorous lust for life, the spark of existence is as fleeting as it is spontaneous.