What I Said Yesterday: narratives of childhood – NEW show @ Verge Gallery #art #Sydney

WHAT: What I Said Yesterday: narratives of childhood

WHO: Artists including Chris Angus, Atong Atem, Josh Bentley, Jacob Boyd-Skinner, Julien Bowman, Nina Dorabialski, Maryann Gascoigne, Sophie Hardcastle, Julien Kenworthy, Luke O’Connor, Ashlee Phillips, Yoshimi Temple, Sophia Temporali, Sam Winters

Curated by Hayley Coghlan and Julian Kenworthy

WHEN: Opening Thursday August 2. August 3-10

WHERE: Verge Gallery, City Road, Jane Foss Russell Plaza, The University of Sydney

We keep coming back to them. They’re our precarious safety blankets, wrapping up the dreams and nightmares through which we filter everything. According to Freud they are the key to all phobias and manias. Childhood memories can be nostalgic and sentimental, but they can also be terrifying and traumatic, full of ghosts in darkened corners, school bullies, and worse…

Featuring a variety of media including photos, videos, installations and performances, this exhibition unleashes the inner-child. Verge will be transformed into an oversized cubby house, partitioned into rooms, each a compartment for a different artist’s baggage. Teetering somewhere between longing and repulsion, ‘What I Said Yesterday’ will take you on a one way trip back to where it all began.

For example…

Memories fade, bleached by the passing of time. Luke O’Connor illustrates this with his de-saturated wardrobe. These pale garments, representative of bygone fashions, are each tied intimately to wavering memories of events and people. They hang in purgatory; unloved ghosts of their former selves.

No childhood party would be complete without sickly-sweet cakes. Sophie Hardcastle makes sure this memory sticks in our throats with inedible delicacies comprised of human hair.

Nina Dorabialski channels both the abject child and Tracey Emin in a work that recognises mess as a legitimate source of individual creativity. Rather than sweeping it under the carpet, Dorabialski presents us with highly personal strata of that which is neither waste, nor useful – ‘mess’.

University of Sydney Union
Jane Foss Russell Plaza, City Rd., The University of Sydney NSW 2006
T: 02 9563 6218  E: g.shapley@usu.usyd.edu.au W: http://verge-gallery.net