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2014

Manners, Habits and Other Received Ideas
The 19th Biennial of Sydney, Australia

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Manners, Habits and Other Received Ideas
The 19th Biennial of Sydney, Australia

For Manners, Habits and Other Received Ideas the artists collected an inventory of gestures from around the city of Sydney with a focus on the presence of Victorianism in architecture and public sculpture while being in residence at Artspace, Sydney. This work set the precedent for The Garden of Future Follies. The sampled fragments of historical forms that comprise these three-dimensional collages are extracted by the same process of pressing foil into parts of existing public monuments and architectural features. From this taxonomy (of over 700 fragments) six new sculptures were produced, the central figure being an exploded Queen Victoria. The surrounding figures reflect tendencies in the design of public structures to use human, animal, vegetal and architectural decorative forms to expand on what we perceive as human. The work plays upon dominant ideologies inherent in public statuary in Sydney, particularly in relation to Victorian era colonialism in Australia.