Exhibition Insight... In-House
Chris Boha, Fractal Cloud, 2020. Steel, LED glass tubes, 1400 x 500 x 450 mm. Photo: Grant Hancock
In-House is the University of South Australia’s fourth biennial research exhibition hosted by the JamFactory and builds on a well-established partnership between these two important South Australian institutions. This exhibition delves into the social, functional and cultural values of chandeliers as a source of inquiry and research, investigating the object’s significance in a contemporary context.
Words by In-House curators Gabriella Bisetto and Andrew Welch.
The chandelier has a strong association with glass as a medium to modify light, playing with both the reflected and refracted light to provide the opportunity for humans to work (and play) beyond the constricts of daylight hours and, in particular, create an interior environment of both wonder and intimacy. Over time chandeliers evolved to become artefacts of virtuoso craftsmanship and symbols of wealth and extravagance. The more ostentatious designs and paradoxical settings of chandeliers in mundane or suburban environments also contributed to the design of chandeliers becoming derided for their obvious pompous spectacle.
How the chandelier has survived the evolution from candle to electrical power as a source of illumination is a story of continual reinvention. Evolving from utilitarian household object, the chandelier has on one hand become an item of luxury and a symbol of wealth and piety, while on the other hand it might be argued that the chandelier is an anachronism left over from a pre-digital and class-based society where the ability to afford expensive candle power demonstrates one’s power and wealth. However, the ability for humans to create a space where they are able engage with others and learn and study perhaps gives us an insight into why such an object remains able to comfort, inspire and encourage us to connect and socialise.
The exhibitors have been asked to respond directly to the place of the chandelier in the 21st century and reference the historical clues in their use of materials and forms associated with both the function and the emotional attachments they have to this lux-object. Chandeliers retain an anachronistic and enigmatic mystery but somehow remain relevant, and in the case of the evolution proposed by these researcher-artists returns to the human scale of the home and as an object of spiritual or mindful contemplation.
The curators of this exhibition invited the exhibitors to examine what agency this obsolete object might have in contemporary times. In an era where makers and their audience are critically aware of how the production and consumption of ‘things’ contribute to global warming, the use of scarce materials and production of luxury objects for a privileged elite, how could the purpose and meaning of the chandelier contribute to the discussion of sustainable/ecological balance, pleasure, illumination and the place of the crafted object in contemporary contexts?
In their day jobs the exhibitors are academic staff who teach in Contemporary Art Programs at UniSA. As practitioners they have extensive art, craft and design experience which in turn informs their teaching. The exhibitors have tackled the task of reinterpreting the chandelier — literally French for ‘candlestick’ — with the variety of approaches that you might expect from makers who work in and across a number of disciplines to interrogate the tradition, form and function of the chandelier. The exhibitors who responded to this brief demonstrate the varied research backgrounds that is inherent in their creative unit; architects, designers, illustrators, printmakers, photographers and sculptors. The works are realised with new and traditional processes.
Peter Schumacher, Wasp Lamp, 2020. Texon paper, 1200 x 600 x 600 mm.
Image courtesy of artist.
Mark Kimber, The Ghost of a Chandelier, 2020. Pigment print framed in timber, 1/6, 800 x 640 mm. Photo: Mark Kimber
Program Director of the Bachelor of Contemporary Art Dr Stephen Atkinson’s work Heavy Light, 2021, draws its title from his reflection that extravagant chandeliers are heavy but made of light. Modelled on the design of South Australian Housing Trust houses prefabricated in Sweden and shipped to Adelaide in the 1950s, the house in Heavy Light seems to float above the ground, barely tethered by its spindly legs. A beacon, guiding us home, or a lighthouse warning of danger: the security promised by a house belies the precarity of the lives it contains. Light is substance and illusion, optimism and oblivion, and here wealth and status of a chandelier is turned inside-out; an ordinary, everyday suburban house as illuminated spectacle, an amalgam of stable structure and unstable memory.
Mark Kimber is an internationally recognised photographer and Head of Photography in the Bachelor of Contemporary Art. Fascination with creating unworldly environment’s through his creation of complex diorama’s saw Kimber sorting through his array of props to create The Ghost of a Chandelier, 2020. Utilising the tiniest dolls house chandelier that he could find, Kimber creates the illusion of a world of splendour in his photographic work that he states ‘is in fact a piece of theatre, as ephemeral as a ghost and lost in a time frame that no longer exists’.
Chris Boha teaches in the Bachelor of Contemporary Art and his Fractal Clouds, 2020, are inspired by the knowledge of the unique neural pathways people with dyslexia have after discovering that both he and his daughter were dyslexic. Using the awareness that dyslexic people literally see and experience the world in a different way, Boha’s Fractal Cloud utilizes the complexity and beauty of chandelier structures as reference point to the similar complexities of the dyslexic mind. In the way that candle power enabled more people to learn to read (and write) this work reminds us that we all experience the world in different ways.
Peter Walker is the Program Director of the Master of Design. Walker’s Lightsticks, 2021, extends the history of chandeliers from its humble beginnings referencing the process where plants transfer light directly through their stems to underground root receptors known as phytochromes. Walker makes use of natural materials to create a dynamic and meditative work riffing on both the tactile and natural qualities of timber, where the connection to nature is clear in the form of the raw tree branch, and lighting which both illuminates and informs the form.
Inspired by the work of Beat artist Brion Gysin, Bachelor of Contemporary Art Lecturer Matt Huppatz inverts the chandelier’s historical connections to power, wealth and spectacle. Dream Machine 1, 2021, references Gysin’s legendary kinetic sculpture, which emitted a flickering light said to produce hallucinations when viewed with closed eyes. Drawing on his fascination with underground queer cultures, nightclubbing and altered states of consciousness, Huppatz’s work re-envisages the chandelier as an object capable of releasing us from forms of social and cultural control.
Lecturer in the Bachelor of Contemporary Art Michael Kutschbach presents us with a conundrum, a chandelier of exquisite materiality that rises out of the floor rather than suspended from the ceiling. Built only for the duration of the exhibition, B. Conifera (flying spaghetti monster), 2021, turns on its head the lavish and majestic nature of the chandelier — presenting an ephemeral and entropic object in a state of decay or flux. Kutschbach’s practice is material and process-based, resulting in haptic outcomes that play on the borders of abstraction. His ongoing search for forms that are new, unfixed and in a literal or suggestive state of flux challenge the longevity and historically grandiosity of chandeliers whilst presenting us with an object that exhibits the same level of mastery of materials and processes as the artisans of the past. These forms are presented as historically ambiguous and are reminiscent at once of odd, ancient cultural artefacts or of futuristic science fiction fragments whose function is long lost and left open to interpretation.
Peter Walker, Lightsticks, 2020. Eucalyptus, LED, 2300 x 2600 x 500 mm. Photo: Grant Hancock.
Hanah Williams, Opulence, 2020. Screenprint on steel plate with rust, 420 x 300 mm. Photo: Hanah Williams.
Hanah Williams teaches printmaking in the Bachelor of Contemporary Art and is a graduate from the Bachelor of Visual Arts (Honours). Opulence, 2020, captures through the process of screen-printing, a disturbing and wistful image of one of the chandeliers from the ill-fated Titanic. This artefact sank with the ship and rests at the bottom of the North Atlantic Ocean serving as a tantalizing ‘memento mori’, a reminder that grandeur and wealth provide no barrier to the fallibility of mankind’s immense technical advancements against the prevailing stature of nature.
In their roles as curators, historians, and researchers at the UniSA Architecture Museum Dr Julie Collins, Dr Melanie Cooper and Dr Louise Bird contribute an extensive knowledge of the built environment and material culture. All of them share a deep passion for working with textiles —weaving, knitting, embroidery and sewing. Taking cues from the construction and structure of eighteenth and nineteenth-century ball gowns, What Lies Beneath, 2021, draws on their extensive crafting background and historical knowledge to ‘bring to light what lies beneath its dark histories through a reimagining of its duel realms. The history of the chandelier is the history of two worlds— that of the elite who danced beneath them and of the labouring classes who worked to keep them aglow. The beauty of the ballroom is replete with sumptuous, whirling gowns, beads, candles and luxury, while beneath the crinolines, countless workers subsisting on hours spent in dark unsanitary workrooms with pricked and bleeding fingers labored in sweated conditions.’[i] What Lies Beneath draws parallels to the similar conditions that can still be found today in factories and workrooms where countless bodies toil to bring goods to market for the privileged. Exploring the hidden labour behind luxury items such as chandeliers, dress and ornament, their work aims to make the viewer question who it was that made them in the past and who it is that makes such items now.
Joanna Majchrowska + Ron Corso lecture in the Bachelor of Design (Communication Design) and have joined forces to exploit the talents of their partnership to realise Sottosopra, 2021, a domestic scale light inspired by the 21 century flat-packed, assemble it yourself approach to our daily environment that has revolutionised the purchasing power of the individual. Aspiring to capture the sense of opulence, elegance and status reserved for objects of grandeur Sottosopra uses easily accessible, low tech materials such as Perspex and LED lighting and contemporary manufacturing processes such as laser cutting to mimic the creation of a chandelier in a manner that reflects a ‘new’ elegance utilising common manufacturing processes and materials.
Senior Lecturer UniSA Creative Peter Schumacher’s practice focusses on manufacture and design of utilitarian objects. The elegant Wasp Lamp, 2021, demonstrates that as a product designer Schumacher retains the sense of materiality and scale of making generally associated with the bespoke artisan object. Utilising sustainable materials, the Wasp Lamp captures the elegance and beauty of nature acknowledging the natural world as the consummate designer.
All of the exhibitors have positioned the chandelier in different ways, drawing on their diverse knowledge and working in small teams or individually to realise their concept. In placing each object in the gallery with insight into each artist’s approach and consideration of how the audience will engage with each work, the curators hope that the viewer will renew their relationship to an object that in contemporary times is sometimes regarded as kitsch. Rediscovering the social connections that an art object has the power to generate is a reflection of how teaching and researching informs the practice of these artists and designers from the University of South Australia. UniSA’s strong relationship with JamFactory is explicitly revealed in the artisanal approach each of the exhibitors have taken to the project, demonstrating that concept needs craft, design could use a bit of art, and objects can be an argument for a more contemplative and connecting human space.
[1] Julie Collins, ‘Artist statement and artist biography for In-House exhibition’, email, 30 June 2020.
In-House will be showing in Gallery One from 26 February - 26 April 2021.