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City Gallery
30 May - 22 Aug 2004 |
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Curatorial
Statement | Artist's
Résumé
The Unbuilt Realm of Indaterminalopolis might be an imaginary
world, but it's certainly no utopian safe-haven. You might
be enticed over to the table-top sculpture by its glossy and
brightly-coloured upper levels, but when you get closer you
realise that these gorgeous blooms float above a dark and
dingy substructure. It's like looking closely at a flower
arrangement and suddenly noticing that each stem is rather
horribly pinned, stapled or wired into place.
Peter Madden's sculptural installations begin life as flat
imagery, which he carefully refashions into spiralling three-dimensional
objects. Gleaning images from books, magazines and encyclopaedias
- National Geographic magazines are a favourite - Madden
slices out the illustrations, then reassembles them in fantastical
constructions. The denuded books are kept - pages intact in
their spines, rustling with empty spaces - for possible future
works.
Although Madden works from second-hand imagery, he often uses
photography as a metaphor when discussing his practice. He
relates The Unbuilt Realm of Indaterminalopolis to the
idea of a body or city or universe examining itself as if
looking through the inner mechanisms of a camera. 'I'm not
a photographer standing on the edge of the world,' Madden
has said. 'In my work, I'm cutting into a body of knowledge,
poetically releasing the images.'
Courtney Johnston
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