images from top.
1. Lisa Kelly ‘No Street Tree’ 2008
Plane tree, jute strap, timber, linen thread, hardware.
Dennis Tan ‘Working title: Private space on constructed space on institutional space’ 2008
found recycled timber from CarriageWorks and ICAN, roofing spans, nails.
2. ‘No Street Tree’ 2008
detail
3. ‘Tree Prop (circle)’ 2008
Inkjet print on heat transfer, Belgian linen, Sydney sand, bias binding, jute strap, thread.
4. ‘Ashtray – – Planter’ 2008
Breeze block, Sydney sand, soil, rubbish plant, cigarette butts, rubber, tape, hardware.
(first butt, opening night)
5. ‘Ashtray – – Planter’ 2008
detail
thumbnails – ‘The Lively Plane’ peopled and planting.
1. The Lively Plane
Dennis Tan & Lisa Kelly
I C A N
15 february – march 2 2008
Sydney
room diagram [28kb] & list of works [24kb]
In 2007 Lisa Kelly undertook an Asialink residency in Singapore and met artist Dennis Tan ~ founder and housekeeper of the independent artist space The Other House in Little India. There they grew the makings of a cooperative dialogue grounded in a mutuality of interests and attitude around practice, hosting, talking, walking and urban observation.
The joint project ‘1.The Lively Plane’ at the Institute for Contemporary Art, Newtown saw a city swap and cultivation of this dialogue via Tan’s one month visit to Sydney. The exhibition roamed around the artists’ material thinking on the constructed environment, relations, building, propping, sculpture, drawing, streetscape and locality.
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‘Inside a small room with white walls and polished timber floors, a plane tree sprouts snug and unassuming from one corner of a raised wooden platform, its top leaves flattened awkwardly against an indifferent ceiling. Also on the platform is a woven mat, a ‘domestic space differentiated from the wilderness’ (1), placed neatly under the shade one imagines might be cast if this tableau were not in fact indoors. The titles of these works (for they are, as it turns out, discrete works by two separate artists), No Street Tree and Working title: Private space on constructed space on Institutional space, suggest two things that lie at the heart of the objects and actions unfolding from this exhibition: the multi-layered and contingent nature of urban space, and the artistic processes used in interrogating and intervening in that space…’
~ read Working Title: Conversations on a Lively Doorstep by Tessa Rapaport at Makeshift Journal