And This Time the Well Is Alive
Floor Talk with Brigid Moriarty

Exhibiting Artists: Alexandra Peters, Alicia Frankovich, Burchill/McCamley, Darcy Wedd, Erin Hallyburton, Iris Touliatou, Joseph Beuys and Pope.L

Join us at Gertrude Contemporary at 2pm on Saturday 12 October, on the final weekend of the exhibition, for a curatorial floor talk with Assistant Curator Brigid Moriarty.

And This Time the Well Is Alive presents works from eight local and international artists, each of whom pervert industrial and bureaucratic forms through grotesquery in their work. Specifically, the exhibition frames these processes through the metaphor of digestion. All the artworks begin with a more or less industrial material foundation that the artists then subvert through methods like disintegration, melting, or poking holes. Inherent to And This Time the Well Is Alive are larger themes of power and wealth. It is often said that with the advent of industrialisation, organic human bodies were rendered machine-like: “engines burning food as fuel.” Indeed, much capitalist and neo-liberal vernacular invokes the language of digestion—“consumerism,” “trimming the fat.” From a socialist perspective, imagery of fatness or pigs is often invoked to conjure corporate and individual greed. Overlaying organic digestive processes on the hard and inorganic materiality of the post-industrial is deliberately jarring. And this is the point: it is precisely through this explicit forcing together of conflicting frameworks that we come to the grotesque—a libidinal desire for something that simultaneously attracts and repels.

The exhibition is open until Sunday 13 October 2024.