Impermanent Durations; On Painting and Time:(part 2)

This exhibition was the second of a series exploring painting and time by the artists Professor Beth Harland, Lancaster Institute for the Contemporary Arts, Lancaster University; Professor David Thomas, Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology University; and Ian Woo, LASALLE College of the Arts, Singapore. The exhibition venue was the Bundoora Homestead Arts Centre, Melbourne, Australia. The project was fully funded by the Singaporean Arts Council and Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology, including artists fees and production costs for the accompanying book. Following the format of the first exhibition in Singapore, a public symposium attended by 45 people was held in the exhibition as part of the Arts Centre’s outreach programme specifically aimed at members of the community who were relatively new to visiting exhibitions. The artists formed the panel which was chaired by the gallery director Claire Watson. The exhibition and its methods were documented, alongside the Singapore exhibition (part 1 of the project), in a book, published by the Institute of Contemporary Arts, Singapore, which included texts by the artists and an essay by Guo Liang Tan. A journal paper on the project ‘Considering Impermanent Durations’, authored by David Thomas, including extracts from a transcript of the symposium discussion, was published in the peer-reviewed Journal of Contemporary Painting, Issue 4.1 Painting and Time (2017). The aim of the second exhibition of the project was to create a series of provocations and reflective experiences for the viewer to negotiate in the gallery space. The installation questioned how we encounter time and impermanence in relation to painting by enabling an unfolding passage of different temporalities and contents. The curatorial method was unusual in bringing together elements made by the artists in advance in studios with others (such as wall painting elements) constructed in the space during installation. The process of producing the exhibition was therefore experimental, enabling an investigation of the relationship between painting’s reflexivity as picture object (often encompassing long periods of time in the making), and other immediate gestures and collaborative compositions that responded to the real space of the gallery site and the on-site ideas of the group.