Cut Colony

Launch: Friday 4 March 6-8pm Melbourne-based artist Cate Consandine interrogates the Australian postcolonial in her film-based work Cut Colony (2012). Consandine explores in this work the relationship between subjects and unforgiving landscapes as physical expressions of psychological states. Both the clay pans and desert lakes of outback New South Wales set the stage for awkward and assertive interactions between the subject and the environment; tense performances that invoke and consider binaries of wet/dry, masculine/feminine, stillness/movement, open/contained, composed and uneasy. Consandine explains, “The relationship that I have as a white Australian in this country to something that’s unnerving, unsettling about these expansive interior landscapes which for someone who’s living in Melbourne and kind of existing on the fringes of this continent… still finds it hard to reconcile herself with, as I think many Australians find it hard to reconcile themselves with their relationship to the Australian landscape and these central desert areas.” Cut Colony will show in the Screeroom at NCCA 27 February to 26 March. Cate Consandine works across a wide range of formal and discursive mediums, including sculpture and spatial practice, video and performance. Her research interrogates the body in the Australian landscape, and its condition in relation to the physiological and psychoanalytic elaborations of space and its emotion. Consandine has exhibited nationally and internationally since 1999. She is a Lecturer in Sculpture and Spatial Practice in the School of Art, Victorian College of the Arts, University of Melbourne. She received a PhD from Monash University in 2015, and is represented by Sarah Scout Presents gallery, Melbourne.