NEWS
Drop the Dust is opening at the Maroondah Art Gallery in Ringwood Victoria this month.
Margaret has been visiting the Nasher Sculpture Centre in Dallas Texas, The Museum of Science in Fort Worth Texas and SITE in Santa Fe New Mexico.
Out of Stardust and Heard it through the Grape Vine are installations being prepared for the Fleurieu Biennale at Fox Creek Winery in South Australia. Opening November 5th 2011. The work is a further development of ideas exploring dusts.
Drop the Dust, an exhibition of 2D and 3D works was first shown at the Flinders University City Gallery, Adelaide SA for the SALA Festival 2010. It was described as ‘bold’, ‘ingenious’ and ‘a new image of what is traditionally Australian’. The new works explore the realm of house dust and dust science and their development was assisted by a grant from Arts SA. The exhibition will travel to Maroonda Art Gallery in Ringwood Victoria and later to Caloundra Regional Art Gallery in Queensland.
QUOTES:
On Drop the Dust:
Taking as its point of departure the ubiquity of dust, the project invites audiences to delve into the concept of dust as a metaphor of life’s transience. Works trace cycles of accumulation, decomposition and reformation offering meditations on mortality and the emergence of new life. The exhibition also explores the materiality of dust – its look and feel in the forms of sand, rust, particleboard, house dust, paper, mineral powders, steel, glass and plastic.
Drop the Dust has been described as an ‘original’, ‘ingenious’ and ‘distinctly Australian exhibition’.
Fiona Salmon, Director, Flinders University Art Museum
“Worth, in this show, is the surprise packet, particularly as seen in her The Secret Life of Domestic Dust vitrines.
… the artist’s deliberate exploration of contrasts between “formal design and seeming randomness” is deftly realised.
That they are intriguing to look at and think about suggests that their metaphoric potential has been tapped.
A similar comment can be made about a series of low-mounted constructions with a common title prefix of Ancient Accumulations Under Pressure.
They come alive as sloughed reptile skins.”
John Neylon The Adelaide Review August 2010 ‘Drop the Dust’
“This is a very Australian exhibition that takes a new look at a very well covered homage to our outback ...”
“The intensity of these panels give the viewer the opportunity to see them either as cross sections of an ancient outback soil profile or aerial views of a seemingly never ending desert.”
RAW: SALA Kryztoff Rating 4K 2010 ‘Drop the Dust’
“The artwork, On Occupied Territory, which highly regarded South Australian artist Margaret Wroth was commissioned to produce, is without doubt an outstanding piece of high quality public art.
Public art can be described as the practice of contemporary art outside the traditional gallery system. This form of art can be seen by a much wider and more varied audience than that seen by the typical art gallery visitor….an art form that has no direct class or social barriers.
Margaret Worth ….has achieved all this and much more. Through her work ‘On Occupied Territory’ she has been able to incorporate a recognition and a respect for the links that exist between our environment, heritage and community.”
Hon Paul Caica MP Minister for Environment and Conservation, Minister for the River Murray, Minister for Water, Hansard Report March 2003
“The unseen flows and forces of energy that circulate throughout the landscape … are the focal points of a substantial quantity of Worth’s … works. One of the virtues … is the ability of … the works to merge and confuse distinction between ‘objective’ and ‘abstract’ perspectives on landscape … and to consider landscape, not merely as a genre of painting but, to quote Mitchell, as ‘a physical and multi-sensory medium.”
Dr. Varga Hosseini, catalogue essay ‘Land Marks – Sounds for the Soul’, Flinders Uni. Art Museum 2004, quoting from WTJ Mitchell (ed.) Landscape and Power, University of Chicago Press, London 1994.