Taking form brings together new works by Melbourne-based artist Agatha Gothe-Snape and Auckland-based artist Sriwhana Spong.

Incorporating installation, sculptural objects, video and live performance, these works engage with ideas of process and transformation, as well as the dialogue between history and the present.

Spong’s project The Stranger’s House includes a large painted backdrop based on an unrealised stage design by Sidney Nolan for the Ballets Russes production of Icare in Australia in 1940. Nolan’s design invokes the myth of Icarus through a highly stylised image of the sun, eyes and wings. Spong’s incarnation considers the mythology of the design, and its historical status as a fragment of a process. A series of fragile objects fashioned from marble and clay accompany the backdrop.

Gothe-Snape’s work Inexhaustible present is based on a movement score that responds to the Gallery’s collection and was developed by dancer and choreographer Brooke Stamp. Documentation of Gothe-Snape’s dancing shadow features in the exhibition, until the last day when she will perform the piece live. Cues for the score range from the experimental films of Len Lye (who is immortalised in a 1925 portrait sculpture by Rayner Hoff in the collection) to the text works of Lawrence Weiner (one of which is on display in the adjacent contemporary galleries).

The exhibition is curated by Anneke Jaspers, assistant curator of contemporary art.

Related events
Artist talk
Saturday 20 July 2013, 2pm
Contemporary Project Space, free

Dance performance by Agatha Gothe-Snape
Sunday 1 September 2013, 4pm
Contemporary Project Space, free

Notes to editor
Agatha Gothe-Snape lives and works in Melbourne and has exhibited extensively in Australia. In recent years her work has featured in major group exhibitions at Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art, Brisbane; Museum of Contemporary Art Australia; and the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, Melbourne. She has recently undertaken projects internationally at The Physics Room in Christchurch, New Zealand, and as part of INexactly THIS – Kunstvlaai, a festival of independent initiatives in Amsterdam.

Sriwhana Spong is based in Auckland. Spong has exhibited throughout New Zealand and internationally for over a decade. In 2012 she held solo exhibitions at the Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tamaki and Neuer Kunstverein, Vienna, and was included in the 18th Biennale of Sydney All Our Relations. Her moving image works have screened internationally in venues including Whitechapel Gallery, London, and The Centre Pompidou in Paris. In July she will relocate to Rotterdam, The Netherlands, to pursue postgraduate studies at the prestigious Piet Zwart Institute.

AGNSW Contemporary Projects are supported by Andrew Cameron