Monday 1 September 2014

PODzome Pop-Up Exhibition Text


Wall text for the exhibition – PODzome
"The rhizome, as envisaged by Gilles Deleuze and FĂ©lix Guattari, is conceptualised as a mobile and open-ended non-structure that is multi-dimensional, non-prescriptive, self-referential, multiple, contradictory and ever-becoming.
Ripe with botanical analogies of self-propagation and untrammelled tuberous growth, the rhizome resists the structurally linear in favour of rhizomatic diversion, organic regeneration, productive affiliation and creative invention. Creativity itself is situated in It is this potential for generative, collective and creative connection suggested by the rhizome, that provides a touchstone for the PODzome exhibition. This is a curatorial convergence – an exhibition that unites multiplicities of practice through conceptually connecting and presenting the work of an already interconnected group of artists: Jen Denzin, Penny Dunstan, Maggie Hensel-Brown, Mandy Robinson, Jane Robinson, Bree Saunders, Brooke Stevens, and Alison Smith. These multiple identities and practices intersect  in reflecting the rhizomatic shape of constantly evolving creative communities, wherein acts of making, collaboration and encounter productively inform each other through creative inter-connectedness.
PODzome presents us with a momentarily stilled materialisation of this shifting inter-connectedness and the ever-becoming and rhizomatic alliances that exist between creative individuals, entities and ideas."(Caelli Jo Brooker)

PODzome: in the middle of things
 
10 to 27 September 2014
Opening: Friday 12 September 2014

http://octapod.org/podspace/exhibitions/

PODzome is a pulse. It is a map. It is a conceptual tuber.

It is an ode to the constancy of local creative adaptations, experiments, expansions and contractions. In a broader context, PODzome marks change, flux, and mobility in and around our city. Its artists are
engaged in urban, creative, and organic rhizomatic networks, which exist 'in the middle of things'1.
PODzome is also a formal 'hat doffing' to the alliances and interconnections generated by and between organisations such as Octapod and the University of Newcastle.

PODzome also heralds the commencement of Newcastle's This is Not Art Festival, 'TiNA'. For almost two decades TiNA, considered one of Australia's leading contemporary emerging arts festivals, has facilitated the convergence of experimental and emerging artists, writers, performers, thinkers, musicians, dancers, arts workers, media makers and creative researchers in a kind of 'transart' ideas and resource exchange.

The University Gallery is delighted to host PODzome for PODspace, an arts initiative that has become an open structure, not fixed to a format or place – it regenerates and grows horizontally with offshoots popping up throughout Newcastle. Rhizome-like. Curated by Jen Denzin, former PODspace Director, PODzome features the work of Jen Denzin, Penny Dunstan, Maggie Hensel-Brown, Mandy Robinson, Eleanor Jane Robinson, Bree Sanders, Brooke Stevens, and Alison Smith.

1 Deleuze, Gilles and Guattari, Felix: A Thousand Plateaus, (University of Minnesota Press: 1987), p7














Mandy Robinson All gone under the sea. All gone under the hill (detail) 2014
240 x 120 x 30 cm, paper, ink, felt, thread and found objects

Jen Denzin installing her work at the University gallery - image by Kerri Shying
Jen Denzin installing her work at the University gallery - image by Kerri Shying