PERFORMANCE
ARTIST 4EVA♡

‘Every passion borders on the chaotic, but the collector’s passion borders on the chaos of memories,’ wrote Walter Benjamin in Unpacking My Library (1931). Naarm-based artist Elvis Richardson is passionate about collecting and collections, creating installations that probe the ethics, politics and poetics of institutional collections as reconstituted artistic readymades. One of her landmark archive projects, the blog CoUNTess est. 2008, and since 2017 the collaborative project Countess Report publishes data on gender representation in the Australian contemporary art world as both art and advocacy using the language of institutional critique.

Curated by Daniel Mudie Cunningham, this major new commission emerged from an invitation to Elvis Richardson to unpack the rich repositories of the Performance Space archive. Following an extensive creative research residency among these analogue and digital records, Elvis has created a site-specific wall work that celebrates and remembers generations of artists and their work. A celebration of our shared history, PERFORMANCE ARTIST 4EVA♡ unleashes a four-decade force of chaotic memories. It is a tribute to the mnemonic monuments comprising a history of creative experimentation and the evolving typographic styles that shape it.

Elvis says: ‘With this commission, I was keen to see what happens when each invitation, advertisement, poster and press release in the archive is treated like an ‘exquisite corpse’ of text and imagery connecting generations of legendary artists and their work. The images and word associations I am assembling from the PSpace goldmine of printed matter are impressed with the promises of so many incredible stories, and I want this work to exhibit the anticipation and bodily presence unique to performance.’

Ticketing: FREE