The Residents - Act #3 - Full House (2022)
Common personal, domestic, industrial and reclaimed readymade objects and fragments
The Residents - Act #3 - Full House plays with absurdist notions and poetics of the everyday lived experience. Totemic structures act out as present ‘beings’, as residents, citizens, and co-habitués. They embody fragility and vulnerability, they awkwardly loiter, suspended, interrupted, hover and jostle, rearranged and rescheduled. We are confronted by ourselves, curious to seek who we are, how to behave, and what to value in this familiar yet puzzling contemporary situation. Materials act together, unified for a certain time before a shift or shed to new ontological associations, forms or bodies allowing a visible decay or entropy to exist in the cycle or passage of time.
About the Artist
Philippa Hagon lives on Gadigal Country in Sydney. She recently completed her MFA at the National Art School and was the 2020/21 Coal Loader Centre for Sustainability artist in residence. Philippa works in the conceptual, spatial and hybrid expanded field of painting utilizing physical and digital materials, assemblage and installation. She has exhibited at Articulate Project Space Leichhardt; The Bondi Pavilion Gallery; Airspace Gallery Marrickville; ESD Gallery East Sydney; and Chrissie Cotter Gallery Camperdown. Philippa’s practice examines the use of everyday common and reclaimed materials to think beyond their useful/literal function, her reclaimed materials invoke the socio-cultural excesses of late-capitalism.
Transcription
I'm Philippa Hagon, I live and work on Gadigal land.
The Residence Act #3 - Full House plays with absurdest notions and poetics of the everyday lived experience. The installation is a grouping of approximately fifteen totemic like structures ranging from fifty centimeters to over two meters in height.
The potemic structures act out as a present being residents futility and vulnerability. They awkwardly loiter, suspended, rearranged, they hover and jostle. I work in the expanded field of painting, so I see the work as a painting you can walk through and therefore the audience becomes part of the work. The work, internally and externally, is made from discarded mass, reduced objects, fragments and low grade materials.
These materials invoked the socio cultural accesses of late capitalisms, over production and hyper consumption. Discarded ways poses questions of value, valueless, worth, worthless, not only in the discarded materials themselves, but in this subjective relationship we have to materiality of desire and excess itself. The work is ephemeral in nature. The residents linger amongst the elements, the rain, wind and nesting spring birds, the hybrid mix of poor and reclaimed materials at unifying before a visible decay, shed or enter entropy starts to appear over the exhibition time. Some have a cement skin to prolong the experience of permits in residence at the Coal Loader Centre for Sustainability through arts and culture or sitting on [] land, so I had a great studio to work in. I had so much fun making this work.
I really enjoy the experience. The assemblage structures utilize reclaim mass produce, poor materials to think beyond their useful literal function. The reimagining of materials, reconsiders the value in the overlooked and discarded and activation of the vitality embedded in common materials is used as productive resistance to the twenty first century excess waste. I collaborate with the past experience of the material, space, thought, labour and use, with the post aesthetic sensibility through the dialogue of assemblage and installation. Mine and others discarded to the desire is gathered from the domestic, street and industrial sites, through my daily life and travels. Time and space in the studio habitat allows the materials to act out in new aesthetic arrangements and spatial play. The work begins with an experimental material play, memory, intuition, chance. Materials are appropriated, utilized, worked with and manipulated. The works at times have multiple iterations, a material flow with changeable, divergent, open and endless paths. The materials coexist for a period of time before being disrupted and reformed. When the works starts to evoke a feeling, I go with it, rearranging, collaging, juxtaposing the signs of capital actors, some sort of anti alterative.
The cemetery is a site of spirit, spiritual experiences, value and meaningful respect for cultural diversity. The ethos of Rookwood cemetery and the themes hidden embrace are deeply embedded in my practice. History, culture, remembrance, diversity, love, mourning, spirituality, cycles of life in the passage of time. The Residents Act #3 - Full House connects to Rookwood cemetery and HIDDEN in multiple ways. Firstly, with the name The Residents. They claim a sense of place, are belonging, they are at home below grade and reclaim sociocultural materials connect to the living web of global interconnectedness, interdependent entities and interwoven systems and relations.
These materials delve into how we make and unmake ourselves through evolving consumption and desire. The work also connects with the ephemerality, temporality, the cyclic determinations and flows of living and dying, the changes in molecules and molecular structures caught informants and space for a temporal moment, either in thought, labor, material fragments, assemblage or installation environments or the wind.
Exhibiting in this open space amongst the elements enhances the spiritual connections to connection to past and present experiences and gives the opportunity for remembering that everything is connected and in a state of flux. The audience will be familiar with many of the materials used. They will know the feel and would have had some experience, but may not immediately recognize what they are looking at. I hope the works invoke a feeling of familiarity for others to contemporary or pass ethological, political, social and cultural situations. I hope they embrace the care and see vibrancy, vitality and value in the overlooked and discarded things in the world.