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Canberra Today 13°/17° | Friday, March 29, 2024 | Digital Edition | Crossword & Sudoku

Arts / Perils of a mazing art

IF you were offered your own private excursion into a barbed wire maze with no-one else allowed, you’d go for it – right?

That’s one of the enticing prizes being offered by Canberra artists Denise Higgins and Gary Smith as they gear up for the upcoming poetic exhibition at Canberra Contemporary Art Space, “The Barbed Maze”.

Crossed_wires
Artists Gary Smith and Denise Higgins… Their “suspended maze” will be made from barbed-wire partitions and mirrored chambers – “a confounding and thorny puzzle”.
The title gives the theme away, but here’s the catch, the barbed wire and mirrors they need cost money and these two trail-blazers need the public’s help with crowd-funding for this show. Together, they hope to raise $7000 to help defray the costs and it’s going well, so far.

Their backgrounds are in 2D and 3D work, but as Higgins and Smith say, they share a compulsion to collaborate on large-scale installations every couple of years.

A “suspended maze” will be made from barbed-wire partitions and mirrored chambers – “a confounding and thorny puzzle”.

Indeed, their maze will not be safe as gallery-goers will be herded and displaced while being subjected to confinement, interrogation and surveillance via sound, video, holographic images, tableaux and objects. Smith and Higgins say their installation will be site-specific and naturally won’t coalesce until it is installed over four days and exhibited over five weeks.

In reality, the CCAS space at Gorman Arts Centre is about 140sqm, but the pair plans to transform it into a maze-scape that is “perceptually” 4000sqm, as lights, cameras and PA systems are used to disrupt the comfortable sense of “this is a gallery”.

The funding target is to buy at least 70 of the 100 sheets of 3mm acrylic mirror needed to completely “re-skin” the gallery walls. The materials will cost around $20,000 in all, the larger part of which will be self-funded.

“There are no pictures of it as yet because the bits don’t come together until we spend the four days in the gallery installing the work.”

The “Barbed Maze” crowd-funding project runs at pozible.com/project/196660 until 10.01pm, Sepember 6.

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Helen Musa

Helen Musa

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