Sneakers, Consumerism & Contemporary Art: Local and international artists unpack the sneaker as a site of contemporary consumption.
4pm – 6pm, Saturday 9 December
Join us for an artist talk on Saturday 20 January from 4-5pm with the curator Kyle Weise and artists Jessica Curry and Keemon Williams.
Sneakers embody the tensions of the contemporary moment, where the immaterial (the brand) surpasses the material (the shoe), and where the seduction of consumerism sits uneasily alongside resistance to capitalism.
Torsion includes new and existing work by local and international artists – the figure of the sneaker acts as a symbol for contemporary capitalism, where even the self is a brand to be cultivated.
The exhibtion is curated by Kyle Weise and includes work by David Attwood, Jessica Curry, Danielle Dean, JD Reforma, Julia Weißenberg and Keemon Williams.
Metro Arts Galleries are open Monday – Friday 10am – 5pm; and Saturdays 10am – 4pm. The galleries are closed Sundays and public holidays.
Download the Room Sheet HERE.
David Attwood presents readymades and sculptural assemblages using contemporary commodities. His work is concerned with the auratic qualities of products and branded materials, especially those associated with work culture and discourses of productivity, entrepreneurialism and maintenance. Attwood is based in Perth/Boorloo Western Australia. In 2016 Attwood received a PhD from Curtin University, and in 2019 completed the SOMA Summer program, SOMA, Mexico City. He has exhibited his work nationally and internationally, and his work is held in Australian public collections, including Artbank and Art Gallery of Western Australia. Alongside his studio practice Attwood directs the independent project space Disneyland Paris, and is co-editor of the book The Art of Laziness: Contemporary Art and Post-work Politics (Art + Australia, 2020). He acknowledges the Whadjuk people of the Noongar nation as the traditional custodians of the land on which he lives and works.
Jessica Curry is a Naarm/Melbourne based artist whose multi-disciplinary practice investigates the way consumption practices articulate a disappointing demand for an absent ideality. Focusing on desire, consumerist culture and the subliminal messages that operate between the object and consumer to explore the experience of material and immaterial, real and ideal and the fetishistic treatment of objects. Since 2015, Curry has exhibited extensively in Naarm/Melbourne and was awarded an MFA from VCA, University of Melbourne in 2021.
Danielle Dean is an interdisciplinary artist whose work explores the geopolitical and material processes that colonize the mind and body. Dean received her MFA from California Institute of the Arts and is an alumna of the Whitney Independent Study Program. She recently worked on a new commission for Performa 21, New York: Amazon (Proxy); and a solo show at The Tate Britain, London (2022): Amazon. Other solo shows include True Red Ruin at the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit (2018). She participated in the Whitney Biennale, New York (2022). Other group exhibitions include Freedom of Movement, Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, Netherlands (2018), The Centre Cannot Hold, Lafayette Anticipation, Paris (2018) and Made in L.A. at The Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (2014).
JD Reforma is a research-driven artist, writer and curator, whose interdisciplinary methodology incorporates video, sculpture, painting, performance, photography, installation, writing and text, and textiles. Across these forms he employs quotation and satire extensively and cultivates a diverse visual language collaged and appropriated from film, popular music, celebrity, fashion and beauty, social media and advertising. His body of work often unpacks personal experiences and encounters, and aims to reveal the inequities of wealth, class, and race intersecting across our relations and embedded within our visual cultures and institutions.
Kyle Weise is a writer and curator, with a longstanding affiliation with not-for-profit and artist-run spaces. Alongside independent curatorial projects, he was a committee member of Kings ARI (Naarm/Melbourne, 2009-11) and, with long-term collaborator Simone Hine, co-founded and co-directed Screen Space (Naarm, 2010-16), Beam Contemporary (Naarm, 2010-2014) and Kuiper Projects (Meanjin/Brisbane, 2017-ongoing). He was the Curator (Exhibition Program) at Metro Arts from 2018-2023. He is currently a Curatorial Officer at Redland Art Gallery and Acting Curator at the University of Queensland Art Museum.
Julia Weißenberg works across video, sculpture, photography and installation to grapple with the alienation of contemporary capitalism and the construction of authenticity within this. She examines the interplay of virtual and architectural spaces in consumer culture, and the way in which consumer objects acts as mediators of personal identity, whilst materially embodying dense networks of global geopolitical forces. In 2012 Weißenberg graduated from the Academy of Media Arts Cologne (Germany) and has since exhibited extensively throughout Europe in galleries and as part of film festivals, in addition to exhibitions in Beijing (China) and Naarm/Melbourne.
Keemon Williams is a queer Meanjin (Brisbane) based artist of Koa, Kuku Yalanji and Meriam Mir descent. He utilizes an array of mediums old and new to expand his relationships with location, personal histories and cultural plasticity to forge a sense of belonging within all parts of the self. Through Installation, photography, ceramics, new media and virtual technologies, he seeks to challenge notions of Queerness, Indigeneity and Australian identity. Williams recent exhibition history has incorporated collaborative, solo and group exhibitions at spaces including Wreckers Artspace, NorthSite, Kuiper Projects, Griffith University Art Museum, Carpark and the National Gallery of Victoria.
Default Collective make artworks for exhibitions.
Printing for the exhibition has been partly sponsored by Loupe Imaging
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Acknowledgement of Country
Metro Arts acknowledge the Jagera and Turrbal peoples, as the custodians of the land we work on, recognising their connection to land, waters and community. We honour the story-telling and art-making at the heart of First Nations’ cultures, and the enrichment it gives to the lives of all Australians.
Metro Arts accepts the invitation of the Uluru Statement from the Heart and supports a First Nations Voice to Parliament enshrined in the Australian Constitution.