For Lauren -Planning for HRAG 2027
Exhibition title
A familiar place I don't know
This title is a generic one for many of the night drawings made over the last 10 years. In them, it relates to the process of beginning without knowing an end point, having something emerge that both surprises and perplexes yet seems very right, and in this sense familiar. Familiar also in that uplift of being immersed in the process is so nourishing ... right.
The title also relates to my take on art making generally. Tapping into ways of making that feel increasingly familiar and allow something to emerge that I could not have imagines.
It also relates to having returned to where I began, the Wimmera, and it feeling both right and wrong... an agitated feeling of going forwards, going backwards. It's nourishment and its austerity. Feeling it's enough, and not enough. Feeling anchored and feeling restless.
Ground floor hrag spaces
Insert plan and number spaces.
1
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5
6
Early thoughts on work to include
Generally new work from the last 5 yrs and linked with some older where it works. Likely nothing pre 2000, given space and hrag showing 1999. There was also the 2015 Kuang Road Prayer showing of that body of work.
https://www.anthonypelchen.com/work-projects/cross-other-media-projects/kuang-road-prayer-2010-14/
Painting
drawing
video
sculpture
Possible writing/essays
Dr Sheridan Palmer
Art Historian/Curator.We have recently been in touch again about a possible new project, known each other for close to 30 yrs and worked together on several past projects.
Andrew Lindsay
Novelist and friend. We have discussed writing responses for some time. He had a good understanding of me and relationship to this land and making, plus art history with a novelist's flare.
Key emblematic colurs
Maybe relevant to some room wall colours, catalogue, etc.
VIDEO
Projection in end room?
It might work in conjunction with the 2 light boxes. Some sort of timing link where video fades and lights come up slowly, then down, in cycles. A darkend room generally.
This video sums up a lot what my work is 'about' ... the impulses that drive it. And links to the 'difficult majesty' notion. The tensions in my relationship to body and land. The paradox of this land - it's uplifting expansive space but its austerity and harshness, the over clearing, spraying and farming ... and of course that it's unceded land. There's also the austerity in my Lutheran upbringing, and the whole roll out of Christianity here generally. Suspect video is also a thumbs up at the experience of male aggression on growing up, and returning periodically, here.A response to a brother. The conglomerate of men and womens' op shop clothing is partly a play of colour (and necessarilly insterting maroon and red as counterpoint to the austerity). I also had outfits of blue and of yellow. It is also a self parody, the kind of folly of me (anyone) in this landscape ... a salute to the foolishness and playfullness. It's kind of ridiculous and brutal at the same time.
Stay or go, 2010
https://vimeo.com/68832392?fl=pl&fe=vl
SCULPTURE
Order of Service – Mum/Dad (redacted), 2025
https://www.anthonypelchen.com/work-projects/selected-recent-projects/order-of-service-mum-dad-redacted-2025/
https://www.anthonypelchen.com/work-projects/cross-other-media-projects/code-maroon/