RECIPROCAL INTERFERENCE
This exhibition commences Wednesday 16 july and ends Saturday 2 August. The opening is Thursday July 17 6pm -8pm.
Each work in Reciprocal Interference is a meeting of two artistic sensibilities. The initiative of Hong Kong-based artist Carol Archer, the exhibition is a series of collaborations with five other artists: Sue Rawlinson (Bondi), Johanna Trainor (Newcastle), Sue Taylor (Googong), Mary Grehan (Ireland) and Even Mak (Hong Kong).
Reciprocal Interference? The phrase comes from Henri Bergson’s essay on laughter. When “two altogether independent series of events” come together, it may generate a comic effect, “the precise formula of which is very difficult to disentangle, by reason of the extraordinary variety of forms in which it appears”. Like the ingredients of a good joke, the works in the Reciprocal Interference exhibition are extremely diverse and could not have been predicted by their makers.
The first of these collaborations began in 2005, the others in 2006. Since then, packages of works-in-progress have been bouncing back and forth between Hong Kong, Ireland and Australia. Each picture in the exhibition results from a challenge posed by one artist and an answering visual intervention by another. No written instructions or descriptions arrived with the pictures. The collaborations proceeded via the combined visual language of painting, drawing, collage and photography. The process is important: these works, all motivated by a desire to creatively interact with another artist, could not have come into being in any other way.
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