SIMONE DOUGLAS // in group show 'Conditional/Return' at New York Gallery, Sara Nightingale Gallery

Image: Simone Douglas, Return, detail, in progress

Artereal Gallery artist Simone Douglas joins other Australian born, New York based artist, Zev Jonas, for Conditional/Return, an exhibition at Sara Nightingale Gallery, opening Friday 17 April from 6-8PM. 

The exhibition investigates alliances and kinships, as well as disconnects, between people, animals and their environments. Jonas’ contemplative photographs examine solitude in nature, while Douglas’ nautical sculpture - a reference to her upcoming large scale desert installation - suggests a merger or reunion with the land.

Jonas’ images, taken from his ongoing series, The Condition, explore the tension between isolation and connection, while considering the relationship we have with our surroundings. The work focuses on the beauty and sensuality of seclusion, as well as the search for a sense of purpose and place. Jonas shoots his work on film and presents it with minimal alteration. His images are untitled, undated and non-location-specific, so viewers can interact with the images with no preconceived notions.

Zev Jonas’ work has been exhibited in the US and Internationally. His solo exhibitions include a presentation at the Australian Consulate, New York timed with the release of a limited edition monograph, a copy of which is housed in the Rare Printed Collection of the State Library of Victoria in Australia. His 2011 solo show, Passage, in NY was a “Notable Show of the Year” in NY Photo Review.

Douglas’ Return encompasses work made over a decade of engagement with landscape and environment. It draws from two of her ongoing projects, Promise and Eternal Return. The former is based on a story of a search for the inland sea in the Australian desert; an explorer sails into the desert looking for the sea and finds himself in the ancient seabed. Douglas is constructing a large scale ship made of ice scheduled for installation in the Australian desert in July 2016. It’s mass has been calibrated so that it will take one month to melt completely, leaving in its wake a trace of red native wildflowers, watered by the melting boat. Eternal Return is a body of photo-based works that “hold night and day, the moon and the sun within one moment of extended time.”

Simone Douglas’ practice includes photography, video, sculpture, installation and site-specific works. She is committed to environmental legacy, intercultural facilitation and making art that serves as a medium to activate key issues of our time. Douglas has exhibited in museums internationally and her works are held in the public collections of the V&A Museum, London, the Art Gallery of NSW, Sydney and the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne. Douglas is the director of the MFA Fine Arts Program at Parsons The New School for Design and serves on the editorial committee of Project Anywhere. She is an honorary faculty member (Research) at The University of Sydney and has curated exhibitions at major international cultural institutions.

The exhibition will run from April 17 - May 17.

SIMONE DOUGLAS // ART & RESEARCH AT THE OUTERMOST LIMITS OF LOCATION SPECIFICITY

 Image: Simone Douglas, Eternal Return, 2014, dry mounted onto Dybond, 180 x 135cm

Internationally renowned artist and Director MFA Fine Arts Program Parsons, Simone Douglas, last week attended, co-organised and chaired the two-day conference 'Art & Research at the Outermost Limits of Location Specificity' alongside Sean Lowry.

The conference, which took place in New York as part of Project Anywhere, explored the challenge of producing and disseminating art and research outside traditional circuits.  

As part of the conference, the following questions were discussed and explored: 

• How should art and research that takes place outside traditional contexts and timeframes in the fields of the visual arts, design and performance be validated, experienced and disseminated? 
• What alternatives exist to the traditional role of the curator? 
• How should art and research be validated within institutional contexts that typically champion the traditional journal based-paradigm for evaluating research outcomes? 
• How do we negotiate the relative values of direct sense experience and exegetical and paratextual elements? 
• Is documentation necessarily a “second best” experience? 
• What kinds of evaluative criteria should we apply to interdisciplinary projects that straddle aesthetic and other realms? 
• What are the outermost limits of location-specificity?

The two-day conference was provided free of charge by Project Anywhere and Parsons Fine Arts, School of Art, Media and Technology, Parsons The New School for Design. 

Project Anywhere is an expanded international project space for art at the outermost limits of location-specificity. The role of curator is replaced with the type of peer review model typically endorsed by a refereed journal. This conference features presentations from international artists that have successfully navigated blind peer evaluation at the proposal stage within Project Anywhere’s 2013 and 2014 programs, together with a series of invited speakers and panel discussions featuring established artists, scholars, graduate students and arts professionals. This two-day event will bring a discursive world of new ideas from art at the outermost limits of location-specificity into critical focus. It marks a call to arms in the ongoing process of finding appropriate new models for the recognition, evaluation and dissemination of expanded art practices.