Exhibitions / Congress (BalletLab McMahon Contemporary Art Award)
24.08.2017 to 02.09.2017
BMCAA recipient Chris Bond presents Congress, a multi-disciplinary work in which he operates under the guise of alter Louise Bryce, to recreate, perform and document Bryce’s imagined performance and sculptural practices.
After a meeting earlier this year at the State Library of Victoria with the historian Judith Weeks, Bond claims to have come into possession of an old ledger book said to have been used as a sketchbook by Bryce, who briefly hired the upstairs room at Temperance Hall as a studio space in 1975.
According to Bond’s narrative, Bryce used the room to develop a private performance practice, which she planned in detail in the book, titled Congress on the cover. The book contains pages of drawn plans for timber and fabric sculptural forms that Bryce envisaged installing throughout the upstairs area at Temperance Hall, and included notations on how they might be interacted with through performance – none of which, according to Weeks’s research, ever materialised.
Bond gives shape to Bryce’s ideas by carefully reconstructing her designs, paying close attention to scale, material, and position in space, while attempting to recreate the relationship of the performer’s body to the object through photographic documentation.
Congress plays with the legitimacy of documentation, questioning its role in performance practices, engaging with the politics of interpretive reconstruction and the awkward position of fiction in contemporary art.
