The Guise of the Solo Performer

In 2015, the Australian exhibition considered the results, implications, and evidence of action by the masses and featured works where differing senses of accumulation were core. For 2019 we are taking a different tack. Rather than works that are energised by drawing numerous individuals into a single dream, this year we focus on individuals that radiate outward. Performers who largely stand alone on stage while their created worlds revolve around them.

The solo performer. The one who stands vulnerable but fearless. A nucleus that the event unfolds around, or so it would seem. In fact (and of course) it takes a village.

Our four key works, CARRION, REPATRIATE, THE RAPTURE, and THE SECOND WOMAN, have performance artists who demonstrate courage and staggering originality smack in their centres. Through putting their own person as the crux of the work they are able to embed a politic and communicate it in a quintessentially individual way. In quite different ways each also works their physicality in concert with the inanimate to achieve an integrated form. In these works costume, mask, and physical space are not an exterior facade. It is only through collaboration with a village of other artists, designers, and composers that the performance becomes.

In a media landscape that loves to celebrate the individual we respond to PQ’s stimulus “that we are here to awaken from the illusion of our separateness”. (Thich Nhat Hanh)

Alongside these successful works we also explore the impossible work of successful artists. We have invited in the ideas that never got off the ground. Those projects that were imagined but never became more than a sketch, an outline or a model. The ambitions that were too expensive, too impractical. The ones that landed in the wrong time or place. Or on deaf ears.

We simultaneously celebrate what has been achieved, while speculating upon what could have been.

Country/Region Australia

Presenting Organization The Association of Optimism, Bureau of Works, The Australia Council for the Arts, Creative Victoria

Curator Anna Tregloan, Erin Milne

Artists CARRION, Justin Shoulder, Matthew Stegh, Corin Ileto, Victoria Hunt, Ben Cisterne, Bob Scott, Jason Cross, REPATRIATE, Latai Taumoepeau, Elias Nohra, Bec Stegh, James Brown, THE SECOND WOMAN, Nat Randal, Anna Breckon, EO Gill, Future Method Studio, Amber Silk, Nina Buchanan, Sophie Roberts, Zhu Zhi-Ying, A-Wing Hsu, THE RAPTURE, Moira Finucane, Jackie Smith, Shinjuku Thief, Eleanor Nalyirrima Dixon, Jennifer Hector, William Eicholtz, Catherine Lane, Josh Weeks, Arts Project Aust

Team Paul Matthews, Clare Britton, Chloe Greaves, Imogen Ross, Tamara Harrison