Helen Grogan
POEM (with insistence on plurality)

Gertrude Contemporary was pleased to present a new exhibition by Studio Artist Helen Grogan. Titled POEM (with insistence on plurality), it is a distillation of long-term research into space(s), observation, and the politics of view. The exhibition was site-responsive, treating the architecture of Gertrude Glasshouse itself as a readymade material—a situation to be expanded and opened in material, ontological, and political ways.

POEM (with insistence on plurality) comprised sculptural installations and video footage of the objects in, and the environmental conditions of, the gallery, which includes its floors, walls, corners, ceiling, doorways, and windows, as well as the passing sounds, light, and activities. Grogan has said of her work, ‘I’m learning that my practice has a lot to do with making an unstable, shifting situation for “viewing”—a resistance of a fixed, dominate, finite, privileged view-point (or end-point).’ Video monitors situated throughout the exhibition produced a multeity of perspectives on the space. The videos reference the vernacular of architectural photography; long-form, fixed-frame shots of the site’s features are drawn into the time-based medium of video to produce a profound decentring effect.

Helen Grogan’s solo exhibitions include: Three Adjoining Spaces with Manifold Edges, West Space, 2015; Three Performative Structures for Slopes, Slopes, 2014; and Specific Applications for This Space (an obituary), Place of Assembly, Melbourne International Arts Festival, 2012. Recent group exhibitions include: Observation Proposition for Interior of Indicated Edges as well as Other Unindicated Parameters Already In Occurrence, in 2nd Tbilisi Triennial, 2015; Object as Score, VCA Margaret Lawrence Gallery, 2015; The Ear is a Brain, Liquid Architecture, 2014; Gertrude Studios Part Two, Gertrude Contemporary, 2014; Framed Movements, Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, 2014; Melbourne Now, National Gallery of Victoria, 2013 – 2014; Interpreting Variable Arrangements, Stockholm Kulturhuset, 2013. Her recent curatorial projects include: Specific In-Between (The choreographic negotiated in six parts), ACCA, 2014. Grogan studied Philosophy and Contemporary Dance at Deakin University, then the City University of New York. Between 2001 and 2005, she continued this research at the School for New Dance Development, Amsterdam School for The Arts.

Helen Grogan’s Gertrude Glasshouse exhibition was accompanied by a catalogue essay by Sarinah Masukor, as part of the 2015 Gertrude Contemporary Emerging Writers Program. Sarinah Masukor is mentored by Jan Bryant.